Matisse, Renoir, and Cézanne paintings are stolen during a heist at an Italian museum. https://ift.tt/z8IYcAX

On March 22nd, thieves broke into the Magnani Rocca Foundation outside of Parma, Italy, stealing works by Henri Matisse, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Paul Cézanne. Italian officials confirmed the robbery on March 30th, as reported by the New York Times.

The stolen works included Renoir’s Les Poissons, an Impressionist painting of three fish on a platter; Cézanne’s Tasse et Plat ⁠de Cerises, a still life of a plate of cherries; and Matisse’s Odalisque on the Terrace, which portrays a nude woman playing the violin to a sleeping Sultan. The works are worth about €9 million ($10.34 million), according to the Italian public broadcaster Rai. This figure has yet to be confirmed by the police.

The Magnani Rocca Foundation was founded by Italian artist Luigi Magnani in 1977. The private art museum is housed in a 19th-century villa in Mamiano di Traversetolo, Italy. It opened to the public in 1990. Other artists featured in its collection include Titian, Francisco de Goya, Anthony van Dyck, and Claude Monet. The museum has remained open during the period following the robbery.

According to the police, the thieves broke into the building through the main entrance in the middle of the night, using a crowbar. The entire heist took around three minutes, and the thieves escaped by crossing the museum gardens. Italian news outlet La Repubblica reported that the thieves left a fourth artwork; however, the title of this work remains unreported.

This robbery is the latest in a string of high-profile museum heists across Europe. Most notably, thieves successfully broke into the Louvre in Paris this past October, making off with more than €88 million ($100.83 million) of jewelry. In January 2025, thieves deployed explosives to steal €4.3 million ($4.9 million) worth of gold artifacts from the Drents Museums in the Netherlands.

Interpol reported that similar heists have increased in recent years, citing how technological advancements make it easier to launder stolen property. “We’re in the smash and grab period, where criminals are taking sledgehammers and forcing their way through doors,” Christopher Marinello, a lawyer and the chief executive of Art Recovery International, told the Guardian. “You can break into anything in three minutes with a ski mask because the CCTV is going to capture what? Nothing.”

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First permanent Ruth Asawa gallery to open in honor of artist’s centennial. https://ift.tt/kAtW15y

A new gallery dedicated to Ruth Asawa’s artworks will open in San Francisco this spring. Her family foundation, Ruth Asawa Lanier Inc. (RAL Inc.), announced that the gallery will be located within the Minnesota Street Project in the city’s Dogpatch neighborhood. The first show, which opens on May 9th, will be titled “Ruth Asawa: Untitled.”

Asawa is best known for her ethereal loop-wired sculptures, which use industrial wire to create suspended forms. Born in Norwalk, California in 1926, Asawa spent a large portion of her childhood in Japanese concentration camps during World War II. After briefly relocating to the Midwest, she attended Black Mountain College in North Carolina with Josef Albers. Asawa returned to California in 1949, establishing herself in San Francisco, where she lived and worked until her death in 2013 at 87.

“San Francisco was Asawa’s home for more than 60 years, during which time she developed a unique artistic language, raised her family, and became a leading advocate for the arts and art education both locally and nationally,” Henry Weverka, Asawa’s grandson and president of RAL Inc., told the San Francisco Chronicle. “Opening a permanent space here in her adopted hometown seems like a wonderful way to celebrate her centennial for many years to come.”

“Ruth Asawa: Untitled” refers to Asawa’s frequent practice of choosing not to give her sculptures names. The family told the Chronicle that the inaugural show will feature her signature wire sculptures alongside selections of her paperfolds, watercolors, and cast artworks. Looking ahead, the gallery space will mount rotating shows of Asawa’s works, often paired with works by close collaborators, such as Albers, Ray Johnson, Imogen Cunningham, and Anni Albers. Meanwhile, an annual exhibition will showcase artwork by students and faculty members of the Ruth Asawa San Francisco School of the Arts, which the artist co-founded in 1982.

Asawa’s work is currently the subject of a major traveling exhibition, “Ruth Asawa: Retrospective.” The show first opened at SFMOMA in April 2025, before being hosted by the Museum of Modern Art in New York from October 2025 to February 2026. The show is now on view at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao through September 13th.

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What Sold at Art Basel Hong Kong 2026 https://ift.tt/ckUM3C2

The 13th edition of Art Basel Hong Kong concluded on March 29, drawing over 91,500 visitors (1,500 more than the reported figure from 2025) across its five-day run at the Convention and Exhibition Centre. The record attendance underscored the city’s resilience as an art-market hub amid a complex geopolitical landscape.

This position was further cemented by a landmark five-year contract between Art Basel and the Hong Kong government, guaranteeing the fair’s exclusivity to the city within the region. Supported by a HK$150 million grant from the Mega Arts and Cultural Events Fund—the same body responsible for attracting major events like Coldplay and the Hong Kong Sevens to the city—the agreement marks the first time such a formal, long-term commitment has been signed since Art Basel’s first Hong Kong fair in 2013.

Beyond the fair venue, Hong Kong’s creative energy spilled into the streets thanks to an array of grassroots projects, standout shows, alternative art fairs, and assorted festivities.

Inside the convention center, 240 galleries from 41 countries and territories reported steady sales. Notably, the fair saw an increased presence of galleries from second-tier Chinese cities, while many prominent ones were granted prime booth locations. This strategic shift highlights Art Basel’s efforts to cultivate the untapped potential of collectors from across mainland China’s wider regions.

A 2025 report by the All-China Federation of Industry and Commerce estimates that over three million private enterprises in China will undergo intergenerational succession within the next decade. This shift is already manifesting in the art market.

These young collectors are widening their scope, pivoting toward female artists and supporting Asian and Asian diaspora creators across all mediums. Ink Studio, which recently opened a new space at Tai Kwun in central Hong Kong, described this edition as a “breakthrough moment.” Co-founder Craig Yee reported the sale of more than 19 works.

The emotional stakes of this new market were vividly captured on the Chinese social media platform Xiaohongshu. A post went viral—garnering thousands of likes and hundreds of comments—depicting a young woman collector in tears at the booth of Ingleby Gallery—one of Artsy’s best booths from the fair—after learning that Caroline Walker’s Dolls House (2026) had already been sold. The outpouring of comments underscored a passionate, visceral engagement with contemporary painting that transcends mere investment.

Blue-chip appetites also remained robust, with the leading transaction a €3.5 million ($4.02 million) Pablo Picasso work at BASTIAN. Dealers David Zwirner, Hauser & Wirth, and White Cube were among those reporting seven-figure sales.

Despite the high-profile sales at the top of the market, many exhibitors noted a shift in the speed of transactions compared to years past. “Interest from both private collectors and corporate clients remains very strong, albeit with a more measured pace of acquisitions this year,” observed Rosemarie Schwarzwälder, founder of Galerie nächst St. Stephan Rosemarie Schwarzwälder.

Schwarzwälder pointed out that the broader economic climate has inevitably begun to weigh on collector sentiment, leading to a more cautious approach to new acquisitions. However, she noted that the gallery’s presentation of works by Korean artist Jiyen Lee served as a significant standout in the fair’s Kabinett showcases, dedicated to solo artist presentations. Lee’s intricate works drew both intense visual engagement and steady sales, proving that even in a more cautious market, collectors remain willing to commit to artists with strong institutional and conceptual foundations.

Independent art advisor and auctioneer Elaine Kwok characterized Hong Kong’s market in 2026 as a year of “finally finding its footing,” rather than returning to the “go-go years” of unrestrained growth of the 2000s and 2010s.

According to Kwok, the current environment is rewarding longevity over opportunistic entry. “The galleries that tend to do well in the Asian market are the ones with outposts in the region, or at least with staff on the ground, building deep relationships throughout the year,” she observed. “You can’t expect to waltz into the fair once a year and expect collectors to buy; you need to invest in relationship-building all year round.”

Here, we round up the key sales reported by galleries at Art Basel Hong Kong 2026.

Top sales at Art Basel Hong Kong 2026

Snow White, 2006
Liu Ye
David Zwirner

David Zwirner led reported sales with a 2006 painting by Liu Ye, Snow White, which sold for $3.8 million. Other major placements from the gallery included:

• A 2002 painting by Marlene Dumas for $3.5 million.
• A 2019 painting by Michaël Borremans for $1.1 million.
• A 1999 work on paper by Yoshitomo Nara for $900,000.
• A 1999 work on paper by Raymond Pettibon for $680,000.
• Andra Ursuța’s sculpture Phantom Mass (2026) for $400,000.
• A new painting by Mamma Andersson for $400,000.
• A 2023 sculpture by Huma Bhabha for $300,000.
• A new painting by Lucas Arruda for $250,000.
• Two paintings by Yu Nishimura for a price in the range of $40,000–$120,000.
• Multiple paintings by Walter Price for a price in the range of $30,000–$90,000.

BASTIAN sold Pablo Picasso’s Le peintre et son modèle (1964) for “approximately” €3.5 million ($4.02 million).

Perdu CCXXVII, 2026
Lee Bul
Hauser & Wirth

Garden, 2025-2026
Qiu Xiaofei
Hauser & Wirth

Hauser & Wirth led sales with two major works by Louise Bourgeois: À Baudelaire (#1) (2008) for $2.95 million and Couple (2002), which was placed with an Asian foundation for $2.2 million. Other highlights included:

• George Condo’s Prismatic Head (2021) for $2.3 million.
• Rashid Johnson’s mixed-media work Broken Soul “Gifts and Messages” (2025) for $750,000.
• Avery Singer’s Chambers St. (v.2) (2026) for $575,000 to a private collector in Asia.
• Qiu Xiaofei’s Garden (2025–2026) for $395,000 to an Asian private collection.
• Flora Yukhnovich’s Be Walking Trees. Be Talking Beasts. (2026) for $325,000 to an Asian private collection.
• Two works by Lee Bul: a 2026 wall work for $275,000 to an Asian museum, and a second work for $260,000 to an Asian private collector.

Waddington Custot’s sales were led by a work by Zao Wou-Ki with an asking price of $2.8 million and two works by Chu Teh-Chun for asking prices of $1.3 million and $1.2 million, respectively.

Deux Papillons sur un Vase Bleu, 1948
Fernand Léger
Cardi Gallery

La Torre, 1966
Giorgio de Chirico
Cardi Gallery

Cardi Gallery’s sales included Fernand Léger’s Deux Papillons sur un Vase Bleu (1948) for $1.8 million and Giorgio de Chirico’s La Torre (1966) for $800,000.

White Cube’s sales were led by Tracey Emin’s Take me to Heaven (2024), which sold for £1.2 million ($1.6 million). Other sales included:

• Antony Gormley’s Plane (2025) for £500,000 ($665,000).
• Mona Hatoum’s Still Life (medical cabinet) IV (2024) for £225,000 ($299,000).

Basketball #5, 1981
Elaine de Kooning
Berry Campbell Gallery

Thaddaeus Ropac’s sales were led by Martha Jungwirth’s Ohne Titel (2021), which sold for €460,000 ($530,000) to a Chinese institution. Additional sales included:

• Megan Rooney’s The Reclining Sky (2025–26) for £280,000 ($372,000).
• Oliver Beer’s Resonance Painting (The Air Around Us) (2026) for £55,000 ($73,000).
• Heemin Chung’s Howling Blue (2025) for $24,000.

Berry Campbell Gallery’s sales were led by Lynne Drexler’s Multipile Moons (1973) for $425,000. Other sales included:

• Alice Baber’s The Mountain Ladder to the Sea (1974) for $275,000.
• Elaine de Kooning’s Basketball #5 (1981) for $100,000.
• Additional unspecified works ranging in price from $25,000–$40,000 apiece.

More key sales at Art Basel Hong Kong 2026

Perrotin reported that approximately 70 percent of its booth sold on the first day, including two sold-out solo presentations and a Takashi Murakami work for $600,000–$800,000.

Sprüth Magers placed Anne Imhof’s Poppy Runner III (2025) with an Asian institution for €220,000 ($253,000). Other sales included:

• Salvo’s Reykjavik (2009) for $135,000.
• David Salle’s Untitled (2024) for $42,000.

Lehmann Maupin placed over 15 works in the $20,000–$400,000 range, featuring artists including Lee Bul, Do Ho Suh, and Mandy El-Sayegh.

Jessica Silverman’s sales included Judy Chicago’s Vicky’s Center (2023) for $165,000 and Atsushi Kaga’s Homage to Jakuchū - Panel 2 (2025) for $125,000.

Kukje Gallery’s sales included two paintings by Ha Chong-hyun for $180,000 each, a Pacita Abad trapunto work for a price in the range of $250,000–$300,000, and a work by Kim Tschang-Yeul for $40,000.

Taka Ishii Gallery sold Jade Fadojutimi’s That day she grieved for the life she never had (2026) for approximately £350,000 ($465,000).

Damaged Gene , 1998
Dinh Q. Lê
P.P.O.W

MASSIMODECARLO sold a painting by Yan Pei-Ming for €250,000–€350,000 ($287,000–$402,000) and a Danh Vō bronze cast for €200,000–€300,000 ($230,000–$345,000).

P•P•O•W sold seven works by Martin Wong, Dinh Q. Lê, Erin M. Riley, and Kyle Dunn for $600,000–$650,000 in total.

Additional sales at Art Basel Hong Kong 2026

Additional notable sales reported by galleries from the fair included:

• Ink Studio sold more than 19 works at the fair, including “several” by Bingyi, ranging from $60,000 to $70,000 apiece, and a Li Huasheng ink-on-paper work for $95,000.
• Alex Daniels-Reflex Amsterdam sold over 30 works by Peggy Kuiper for €8,000–€50,000 ($9,200–$57,500) apiece.
• YveYANG Gallery sold 15 works by Li Tangting for $5,000–$10,000 each.
• Plan X sold ThankYouX’s Quiet Balance (2026) for $50,000 and an unspecified number of Kevin Abosch prints for $10,000–$58,000 each.
• Flowers sold seven works by Movana Chen for $5,000–$10,000 each.
• TAEX sold an unspecified number of archival prints by Kevin Abosch for prices ranging between $10,000–$58,000.
• Uffner & Liu sold six works from its booth for a total price of $100,000–$120,000.
• Gagosian reported sales across works by Louise Bonnet, Takashi Murakami, Ed Ruscha, and Stanley Whitney for unspecified prices.

Browse a selection of for-sale works from Art Basel Hong Kong 2026 galleries here.

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Rocky statue moved inside the Philadelphia Museum of Art for new show. https://ift.tt/OECw1RQ

Rocky is going the distance. A statue of the fictional boxing hero, first brought to life by Sylvester Stallone in 1976, has been moved from its longtime perch outside the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA) into the building ahead of a major new exhibition. “Rising Up: Rocky and the Making of Monuments” features 150 works by more than 50 artists to explore the changing role of monuments throughout 2,000 years of art history. The show will run from April 25th to August 2nd.

The Rocky Balboa statue is one of three monuments dedicated to the fictional boxing star located in Philadelphia. The bronze statue was created by American sculptor A. Thomas Schomberg in 1980 for Rocky III. It featured prominently behind the actor during a speech in the film. The nine-foot, 1,100-pound bronze statue has lived outside the museum since 2006. The exhibition will coincide with the 50th anniversary of the original Rocky.

The PMA announced that it will frame the exhibition “Rising Up” “through the lens of the Rocky statue.” This work will be featured alongside a wide range of ancient monuments and contemporary artworks. Among the works on view will be the ancient vessel Neck Amphora (ca. 510–490 BCE) as well as Hank Willis Thomas’s bronze statue of a raised fist, Solidarity (2023). “‘Rising Up’ asks why millions of people each year visit a statue of the most famous Philadelphian who never lived as a way to better understand our complex and vital relationships to our public monuments,” said Paul Farber, curator of the exhibition and co-founder of Monument Lab.

The exhibition will also feature works by Keith Haring, Rashid Johnson, Delilah Montoya, Tavares Strachan, Kara Walker, Andy Warhol, and Carrie Mae Weems, among others.

“‘Rising Up’ is an opportunity for the art museum to reframe the narrative around Rocky and the steps, placing it in the context of Philadelphia’s civic and cultural identity,” Louis Marchesano, the museum’s deputy director of curatorial affairs and conservation, said in a statement.

There is a second Rocky statue at the museum, perched on the “Rocky Steps.” It will remain outside for the duration of the exhibition. The third edition is housed at the Philadelphia International Airport. Meanwhile, a statue of real boxing legend “Smokin” Joe Frazier, who triumphed against Muhammad Ali, will replace Rocky outside the museum.

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Hurvin Anderson’s Luscious Paintings Explore the Meaning of Home https://ift.tt/ucmngRb

In Ball Watching (1997) by the British painter Hurvin Anderson, a group of boys stand on a patch of grass by a lake. The sky is a hazy blue, the water a vivid turquoise. The green beneath them, as they face away from the viewer, contrasts with the dark gravel behind, isolating them in what feels almost like their own tropical island.

Anderson returned to this scene repeatedly between 1997 and 2010, turning a 1983 photograph he took in the overgrown Handsworth Park in Birmingham, U.K., into an emotionally charged vision of both his hometown and the Caribbean, where his parents immigrated from. In a later version, Ball Watching (Five-a-Side) (2010), Caribbean trees dominate the skyline, their usual vibrancy muted by washes of gray.

“The way the ball was in the middle of the photograph in the middle of the pond, it seemed like the moon had fallen out of the sky,” he said in a recent interview. Throughout his career, such atmospheric explorations of home and belonging have become his hallmark.

Hurvin Anderson’s major retrospective

Now 61, Anderson spoke to me at a café at Tate Britain ahead of his largest presentation to date. Curated by Dominique Heyse-Moore, senior curator of contemporary British art at the institution, “Hurvin Anderson” will be on view through 23 August. It brings together more than 80 works spanning three decades.

Since graduating from Wimbledon College of Art and the Royal College of Art in 1994 and 1998 respectively, the artist has developed a significant body of work that explores migration, memory, and identity. His dynamic paintings, which predominantly blend his own photographs and recollections with painterly abstraction, earned him a Turner Prize nomination in 2017 and are held in major collections worldwide, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Kistefos Museum in Norway, and the British Council Collection in London.

When we met, Anderson was dressed casually in a green beanie hat, blue polo shirt, and gray fleece. His friend, the renowned British artist and academic Keith Piper, waits for us nearby. It’s two weeks before the opening, and Anderson is in the middle of installing the show. Despite being widely described as one of the leading painters in the country—in 2021, his swimming pool scene Audition (1998) sold at Christie’s for more than $10 million, one of the highest prices achieved at auction by a living Black British artist—he remains unduly modest. “I’m not sure I've done enough, and there are many people who have been around longer and haven’t had this,” he said. “I’m still trying to work out ‘why me?’ at this moment in time.”

At the time of his nomination, the Turner Prize judges described Anderson as “an outstanding British painter whose art speaks to our current political moment with questions about identity and belonging.” Yet almost a decade on, many of these conversations remain globally pertinent.

Themes in Anderson’s paintings

Anderson is predominantly known as a landscape painter who often depicts the Caribbean and England, referencing his own sense of in-betweenness, which many immigrants can relate to. His paintings are “usually looking at a particular mood, time of day, a particular corner, a particular home,” said Heyse-Moore. “But then there’s always the thought of another place.”

Anderson described his work as being about “travel,” which encompasses both physical migration and leisure. His parents moved from Jamaica to Birmingham, England, in the early 1960s as part of the Windrush generation: Caribbean migrants invited to Britain to work between 1948 and 1973. Out of his parents’ eight children, he was the only one born in the U.K. Anderson grew up hearing about Jamaica, which he first visited as a teenager in 1979. His work shows a deep affinity to the country and its landscapes, often depicting spaces occupied by immigrants. “It’s part of Black people’s condition—wrestling with this idea of wanting to be somewhere else,” he explained. “If it's not [as a result of] history, [for example], slavery, it’s migration because of poverty, or potentially now, again, because of the political situation—that state is always there.”

Anderson’s impressionistic oil paintings also traverse French art history, and paintings of leisure in particular. “I was slightly obsessed with [Edgar] Degas and the small painting in the National Gallery called Young Spartans Exercising (1860) and [those by] Georges Seurat,” he said. “I can’t escape my connection to those paintings.”

Painting a wider history of migration

Anderson’s long-running series of barbershop paintings, which he began in 2006 and continued for almost two decades, bring his explorations of belonging indoors. His “Peter’s Series” in particular, which he started in 2007, portrays an attic converted into a makeshift barbershop that his father frequented. With white barbers reticent to cut Black hair, Caribbean immigrants of the 1950s and ’60s would cut one another’s hair at home.

Yet Anderson’s barbershop paintings were also about the aesthetics of looking. By the time he painted Skiffle (2023–26), which depicts mirrors, barber chairs, and barbershop décor to create an almost abstract composition, the viewer is as much a part of the painting as the sitter. “In the earlier paintings, you are always outside,” he said. But by the mid-2020s, “you are joining in…the barber, a new customer, for a moment you are there.”

While the political elements of Anderson’s paintings are often subtle, his recent body of work is more explicit. Passenger Opportunity (2024–25), commissioned by Pérez Art Museum Miami, explores the wider social history of migration between Jamaica and Britain. “It’s probably the most ambitious work in the show,” said Heyse-Moore of the 13-by-32-foot piece.

Over 16 panels, Anderson offers a deeply layered narrative of arrivals, departures, family life, officials gathering, scenes from colonial history, and more. In the top left corner, he reworks an advertisement known as “Passenger Opportunity” that invited Jamaicans to leave their country to work in England. “He moves through this story, which is principally about the different generations, so children and adults who become separated for a time while these new lives are established,” Heyse-Moore explained. “There’s depictions of the Caribbean, there’s depictions of England, and it’s really intensely colorful, but then also at times it's clearly from black-and-white photographs.” In the bottom right corner, Anderson has illustrated a scene that suggests slaves being sold in green, white, and black.

Painting helps Anderson make sense of the world; his captivating landscapes and intimate interiors form a complex, shared history. “I’m trying to understand our times,” he said. His work is a way to “start to understand everything a little bit more.”

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BTS performs at the Guggenheim Museum for “The Tonight Show” with Jimmy Fallon. https://ift.tt/1jZKN90

With K-pop dominating headlines—especially following K-Pop Demon Hunters’ win for best animated film at the 2026 Oscars—the genre is now making art world inroads. Beloved K-pop boyband BTS performed their new single, Swim, at the Guggenheim Museum in New York for a segment on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon this past Wednesday.

The performance celebrated the release of BTS’s 10th studio album, ARIRANG, which was released on March 20th—six years after their last album. The recording shows the seven original members at the center of the Guggenheim’s signature rotunda. “With a storied history of drawing in the most creative minds in arts and culture for nearly 90 years, the Guggenheim was the perfect fit to bring BTS’ vision to life for their return to the stage,” the Guggenheim staff wrote in a statement.

The museum is currently showing a massive retrospective of work by Carol Bove, which opened on March 5th. Bove is known for her epically scaled sculptures, which incorporate brightly painted industrial materials, such as steel tubes and rebar. Fallon introduced the boyband at the beginning of the video in front of Bove’s Vase Face I / The Ascent to Heaven on a Dentist’s Chair (2022). After the introduction, the singers make their way around the rotunda among Bove’s minimalist metal sculptures, including the yellow Cutting Corners (2018).

BTS’s leading man, RM (Kim Namjoon), is one of South Korea’s leading art collectors. Artsy reported earlier this year that RM has engaged with artists including Kim Whanki, Yun Hyong-keun, Lee Ufan, Lee Jung-seob, and Kwon Jin Kyu. Meanwhile, his bandmate, V, has collected a deer sculpture by South Korean artist Kim Woo Jin and Woo Kuk Won’s painting Lunatic Beauty (2022), among other works.

Beyond BTS members, several other young K-pop stars are also avid art collectors. They include T.O.P, Taeyang, and G-Dragon from the band BIGBANG, and Cha Eun-woo of ASTRO.

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Rashid Johnson photographs Jay-Z for GQ. https://ift.tt/S4oq7kz

GQ tapped American artist Rashid Johnson to photograph Jay-Z for its new special global issue, which was released on March 24th. The photoshoot accompanies a major interview with the musician and art collector, tied to the 30th anniversary of his debut album, Reasonable Doubt.

Johnson is known for exploring Black American life through an extensive body of work that ranges from photography and painting to large-scale installation. For this photoshoot, which captures Jay-Z in contemplative poses, Johnson pulled from the observational photographs of Harlem Renaissance artist James Van Der Zee and the surrealist tendencies of Francis Bacon, according to his interview with GQ. In one image, Jay-Z partially covers his face with a mask as he stares into the camera.

Jay-Z, an avid art collector and champion of Black artists, has collected Johnson’s work for a decade. Johnson similarly hopes to champion Jay-Z’s legacy through these new photographs.

“Jay’s music, lyricism, and sophistication are very much in line with a lot of interesting and historically important Black thinkers,” Johnson told GQ. “He unpacked the density, the complexity, and the rigors of aspects of the Black experience, from issues of developing credit and finding credibility.”

Over the last two decades, Jay-Z has become one of the most active high-profile celebrities in the art world. His collection includes works by artists such as Damien Hirst, as reported by the BBC, and Laurie Simmons, as reported by CBS News. The rapper filmed a music video for Picasso Baby at New York’s Pace Gallery and commissioned Derrick Adams to transform a painting of his into an NFT. Sotheby’s revealed that Jay-Z owns Adams’s Style Variation (2020), as reported by ArtNews.

Johnson has made headlines several times in recent years. In 2025, Johnson was the subject of a massive retrospective at the Guggenheim in New York, which featured almost 90 works. He has had recent solo exhibitions at Hauser & Wirth Paris in 2024 and Stockholm’s Moderna Museet in 2023.

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