ollowing on from opening her exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, which continues until August, the US-born, Berlin-based artist Christine Sun Kim this week opened a show in London in collaboration with Thomas Mader. The exhibition, 1880 THAT, uses a notorious historic conference in Milan in 1880, which effectively outlawed sign language in Deaf education, as a springboard to explore languages and stigma in Deaf and hearing cultures today. Ben Luke discusses the show with Kim and Mader. In Abu Dhabi, the latest museum devoted to the interactive art of the Japanese collective teamLab opens this week in the Saadiyat Cultural District. The Art Newspaper’s reporter in the Middle East, Melissa Gronlund, has visited the museum and tells us more about teamLab’s newest immersive experience. And this episode’s Work of the Week is Young Woman seated at a Virginal (1670-75), a painting by Jan Vermeer that may be the very last picture he ever made. Our special correspondent, Martin Bailey, tells us how new conservation of the picture has revealed that 17th-century pollution may hold the key to dating the painting.

1880 THAT: Christine Sun Kim and Thomas Mader, Wellcome Collection, London, until 16 November; Christine Sun Kim: All Day All Night is at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, until 6 July.

teamLab: Phenomena, Abu Dhabi, opens 18 April.

From Rembrandt to Vermeer: Masterpieces from The Leiden Collection, H’ART Museum, Amsterdam, until 24 August.

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In two-and-a-half months since the inauguration of President Donald Trump, a series of executive orders and other initiatives have attempted systematically to eliminate and defund some of the federal agencies responsible for the distribution of federal money to museums, libraries and other organisations. The Art Newspaper’s editor-in-chief in the Americas, Ben Sutton, joins Ben Luke to discuss what is being seen as an authoritarian and ideologically driven attempt to control cultural activities in taxpayer-funded institutions, restrict free speech and—to use the administration’s own term—“rewrite history”. We also discuss the effect of the economic chaos caused by President Trump’s seesawing on trade tariffs in the past week. That same topic is discussed by Clare McAndrew of Arts Economics, the writer of the Art Basel and UBS Art Market Report 2025. The report’s key finding is that global art sales declined by 12% in 2024 and McAndrew discusses this stark statistic and other aspects of the survey. And this episode’s Works of the Week are by Mainie Jellett and Evie Hone, the two artists in an exhibition subtitled The Art of Friendship at the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin. Jellett and Hone were key figures in Irish Modernism, and we talk to one of the curators of the exhibition, Brendan Rooney, about Jellett’s painting, Decoration (1923) and Hone’s stained-glass image of a chalice (1948-52), a study for her most famous piece, the East Window of Eton College Chapel in Berkshire, UK.

The Art Basel and UBS Art Market Report 2025, theartmarket.artbasel.com.

Mainie Jellett and Evie Hone: The Art of Friendship, National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin, until 10 August.

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he Art Newspaper’s annual report on museum visitor figures is out and shows that the slow build-back after the Covid-19 closures is over, and museums are back at what we might consider their “natural level”. Host Ben Luke talks to the co-editor of our report, Lee Cheshire, about what that means, and who were last year’s big winners and losers. A new exhibition at the museum in the former London home of the 19th-century designer, socialist activist and writer, William Morris, looks at his ubiquity in the 21st century. Our associate digital editor, Alexander Morrison, visits Morris Mania, as the show is called, and talks to the William Morris Gallery’s director Hadrian Garrard. And this episode’s Work of the Week is a painting made in the winter of 1906 to 1907 by Henri Matisse. It depicts his daughter, Marguerite, and is a highlight of a show at the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, called Matisse and Marguerite: Through her Father’s Eyes. Ben Luke discusses the painting and its subject with Charlotte Barat-Mabille, one of the curators of the exhibition.

Morris Mania, William Morris Gallery, London, 5 April-21 September

Matisse and Marguerite: Through Her Father’s Eyes, Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, until 24 August 2025

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After a five-year closure, the Frick Collection in New York will reopen to the public on 17 April and this week opened its doors to the press. The Gilded Age mansion, created on Fifth Avenue for the industrialist Henry Clay Frick, has been restored and enhanced by Selldorf Architects, with the executive architect Beyer Blinder Belle. It is the biggest upgrade to the building since it first became a museum in 1935. Ben Luke talks to the architect Annabelle Selldorf. Then, Cabelle Ahn, a contributor to The Art Newspaper who is a specialist in 18th-century art, joins us to review the transformed museum. This episode’s Work of the Week is A woman abalone diver wrestling with an octopus (around 1870), a woodblock print by the Japanese artist Taiso Yoshitoshi. Our associate digital editor, Alexander Morrison, discusses the work with James Russell, the curator of a new exhibition, Undersea, at Hastings Contemporary in the UK.

The Frick Collection opens on 17 April.

Undersea, Hastings Contemporary, 29 March-14 September.

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The largest ever exhibition of the work of Jack Whitten opens this weekend at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York. Ben Luke speaks to Michelle Kuo, the curator of the show, about the political and experimental commitment that drove Whitten’s remarkable body of work. In Paris, one of the final exhibitions to open at the Centre Pompidou before it closes for five years was unveiled this week. Paris Noir brings together more than 150 artists from across the African diaspora who were based in, or had notable stays in, the French capital between the 1950s and 2000. Ben went to Paris to speak to Alicia Knock, the lead curator on the show. And this episode’s Work of the Week is Arpita Singh’s Searching Sita Through Torn Papers, Paper Strips and Labels (2015). It features in a new exhibition of the Indian artist’s work at the Serpentine North in London. The Art Newspaper’s associate digital editor, Alexander Morrison, spoke to the Serpentine Galleries’ artistic director, Hans Ulrich Obrist, about the painting.

Jack Whitten: The Messenger, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 23 March-2 August. You can hear Jack Whitten talking about his life and work in the show’s audioguide at moma.org.

Paris Noir: Artistic Circulations and Anti-colonial Resistance, 1950-2000, Centre Pompidou, Paris, until 30 June.

Arpita Singh: Remembering, Serpentine North, London, until 27 July.

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After a challenging year in which international galleries, auction houses and museums have been forced to scale back their operations and make redundancies on an alarming scale, a slower, more considered approach to business seems to be emerging. So are we into an era of longer, more in-depth exhibitions and bespoke events concerned more with authentic connection than flashy spectacle? Ben Luke talks to Anny Shaw, a contributing editor at The Art Newspaper. In the Netherlands, just as in the US, cuts by far-right politicians to international development seem likely to have a huge impact on arts projects. As Tefaf, the major international art fair opens in the Dutch city of Maastricht, we talk to Senay Boztas, our correspondent based in Amsterdam, about fears of a funding crisis. And this episode’s Work of the Week is one of the greatest paintings ever made: The Hunters in the Snow (1565) by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. It is part of an exhibition called Arcimboldo – Bassano – Bruegel: Nature’s Time, which opened this week at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. The museum’s director, Jonathan Fine, tells us more.

Arcimboldo–Bassano–Bruegel: Nature’s Time, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, until 29 June

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It seems absurd that more than a year ahead of the next Venice Biennale, one of the major pavilions in the Giardini might be empty for next year’s event. But that is the dilemma facing Creative Australia, which is responsible for that country’s Biennale presentation. Last month, it announced the team comprising the Lebanese-born Sydney-based artist Khaled Sabsabi and the curator Michael Dagostino as its selection for the 2026 event—and then, within days, rescinded the invitation. An almighty row has engulfed the Australian art world to the extent that the pavilion has been thrown into doubt. So what happened? The Art Newspaper’s Australian correspondent, Elizabeth Fortescue, tells Ben Luke about the debacle. A controversial auction of AI art concluded this week on Christie’s website. It prompted an open letter signed by thousands of artists and creative people asking Christie’s to cancel the sale and accusing the auction house of incentivising the “mass theft of human artists’ work”. We talk to Louis Jebb, The Art Newspaper’s managing editor, who oversees our technology coverage, about the sale and the latest developments in art and AI. And this episode’s Work of the Week is Tired (1946), a terracotta sculpture made by the American-Mexican artist Elizabeth Catlett. It is part of the touring exhibition Elizabeth Catlett: A Black Revolutionary Artist, which arrived this week at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, after premiering at the Brooklyn Museum in New York last year. We discuss the sculpture with Catherine Morris, a senior curator at the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum, who co-curated the exhibition, and Lynn Matheny, the National Gallery of Art’s deputy head of interpretation and curator of special projects.

Elizabeth Catlett: A Black Revolutionary Artist, National Gallery of Art, 9 March-6 July; Art Institute of Chicago, 30 August-4 January 2026.

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Tate Modern this week opened a vast exhibition exploring the life and work of the maverick Australian-born performance artist, fashion designer and self-styled “club monster”, Leigh Bowery, as well as the variety of cultural figures in his orbit in London. It coincides with other related London shows: one analysing the fashion work of Bowery and his collaborators and peers at the Fashion and Textile Museum, and another at the National Portrait Gallery about the style and culture magazine The Face, which emerged around the same time as Bowery set foot in the UK capital in the early 1980s. Ben Luke reviews the shows with Louisa Buck, The Art Newspaper’s contemporary art correspondent. Three years on from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and amid fraught international diplomacy following the US’s abrupt shift in approach to the war under President Trump, we speak to Sophia Kishkovsky, our international correspondent who has widely reported on Russia and Ukraine, about how Ukraine’s art world is responding to this new era. And this episode’s Work of the Week is actually a pair of works made more than 400 years apart called The Women’s Bath. The first is a woodcut based on a drawing by Albrecht Dürer from around 1500; the second a painting responding to it, made by the German artist Max Beckmann in 1919. They feature in an exhibition opening this week at the National Museum in Oslo, Gothic Modern: From Darkness to Light. Cynthia Osiecki, a curator at the museum, tells us more.

Leigh Bowery!, Tate Modern, until 31 August; Outlaws: Fashion Renegades of 80s London, Fashion and Textile Museum, London, until 9 March; The Face Magazine: Culture Shift, National Portrait Gallery, London, until 18 May.

Gothic Modern: From Darkness to Light, National Museum, Oslo, 28 February-15 June.

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Shows opening in Washington and Dublin this month explore quiltmaking by African American women. Ben Luke talks to Raina Lampkins-Fielder, chief curator for the Souls Grown Deep Foundation, and the organiser of the exhibition Kith & Kin: The Quilts of Gee’s Bend at the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA), about the history of quiltmaking in this small part of Alabama, and the growing recognition of its artistic importance. The Musée Picasso in Paris this week unveiled its exhibition “Degenerate” art: Modern art on trial under the Nazis, which looks back not just at the infamous 1937 exhibition in Munich but also the years-long campaign to attack modern art and artists in Germany in the 1930s and 1940s. We speak to the exhibition’s co-curator, Johan Popelard. And this episode’s Work of the Week marks the death last week of Mel Bochner, a leading figure in the development of conceptual art. We speak to his gallerist, Peter Freeman, who knew and worked with Bochner for more than 50 years. We look in particular detail at the 1969 work, 48" Standards (#1).

Last chance: The Art Newspaper’s book The Year Ahead 2025, an authoritative guide to the year’s unmissable art exhibitions, museum openings and significant art events, is available to buy at theartnewspaper.com for £14.99 or the equivalent in your currency, until Sunday, 23 February. Buy it here. https://account.theartnewspaper.com/subscribe?sourcecode=year_ahead&utm_source=podcast&utm_campaign=theyearahead

Kith & Kin: The Quilts of Gee’s Bend, IMMA, the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, from 28 February-27 October; We Gather at the Edge: Black Women and Contemporary Quilts, Renwick Gallery, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC, 21 February-22 June; Fabric of a Nation: American Quilt Stories, Frist Art Museum, Nashville, US, 27 June-12 October

“Degenerate” art: Modern art on trial under the Nazis, Musée Picasso, Paris, until 25 May.

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Next month, the German artist Anselm Kiefer will be 80, and the first of a number of shows internationally to mark this landmark moment opened this week at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, UK. It focuses on his early works, and Ben Luke visits Oxford to discuss this pivotal moment in his career with Lena Fritsch, the curator of the exhibition. The latest edition of the biennial in the United Arab Emirate of Sharjah opened earlier this month. The Art Newspaper’s correspondent Dale Berning Sawa visited during opening week and spoke to Sheikha Hoor Al Qasimi, the president and director of Sharjah Art Foundation, which runs the biennial, about this year’s edition, her journey in art, and her role in establishing the biennial as a leading art world event. And this episode’s Work of the Week is Portrait of Mateu Fernández de Soto (1901) by Pablo Picasso, a painting from the artist’s Blue Period. Conservators at The Courtauld Institute in London have discovered an image of a mystery woman hidden beneath this portrait of De Soto, Picasso’s friend and fellow artist. We talk to Barnaby Wright, deputy head of The Courtauld Gallery, about the painting and the image beneath it. The work features in a new exhibition at the gallery, Goya to Impressionism. Masterpieces from the Oskar Reinhart Collection.

Anselm Kiefer: Early Works, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, UK, 14 February-15 June; Anselm Kiefer: Where Have All the Flowers Gone, Van Gogh Museum and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, 7 March-9 June; Kiefer / Van Gogh, Royal Academy of Arts, London, 28 June-26 October; Anselm Kiefer: Becoming the Ocean, Saint Louis Art Museum, US, 18 October 2025-25 January 2026

To carry, the 16th Sharjah Biennial, until 15 June 2025.

The Griffin Catalyst Exhibition: Goya to Impressionism. Masterpieces from the Oskar Reinhart Collection, The Courtauld Gallery, London, 14 February-26 May.

The Art Newspaper’s book The Year Ahead 2025, an authoritative guide to the year’s unmissable art exhibitions, museum openings and significant art events, is still available to buy at theartnewspaper.com for £14.99 or the equivalent in your currency. Buy it here.

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