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artist Khaled Sabsabi and the curator Michael Dagostino as its selection for the 2026 event—and then, within days, rescinded the invitation.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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Last weekend, the US President Donald Trump signed executive orders placing 25 percent tariffs on Mexico and Canada, which were due to take effect on Tuesday. But at the last minute, the tariffs were postponed, at least for a month. Inevitably, though, the talk of a trade war set nerves jangling at Zona Maco, the art fair in Mexico City, which opened on Wednesday. Ben Luke speaks to Ben Sutton, The Art Newspaper’s editor, Americas, who is in the Mexican capital, about the prevailing mood, and about the effect on the art world more generally of some of Trump’s executive orders. It is also the India Art Fair in Delhi this week. Our art market editor, Kabir Jhala, is there and tells us more about the fair amid the wider social and political climate in India. And this episode’s Work of the Week is Henry Fitz Jr’s self-portrait, a daguerreotype, made in January or February 1840. It is thought to be the first photograph of a person made in the United States. It features in a major show at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, American Photography. We speak to Mattie Boom, Rijksmuseum’s curator of Photography, about the work, and the wider show.

Zona Maco, Mexico City, until 9 February.

The India Art Fair, Delhi, until 9 February.

American Photography, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, until 9 June. Carrie Mae Weems’s 2021 series Painting the Town, Rijksmuseum, until the same date.

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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Peter Hujar, Gregg Bordowitz and Rotimi Fani-Kayode are three artists whose work reflects in different ways on the Aids crisis that has devastated communities across the world since the 1980s. Hujar, who died from Aids-related pneumonia in 1987, is the subject of a new show at Raven Row in London, the largest to date at a UK gallery. Host Ben Luke takes a tour of the show with its curators, the writer John Douglas Millar, and the artist, master printer and model for some of Hujar’s photographs, Gary Schneider. The artist Gregg Bordowitz was a member of The Aids Coalition to Unleash Power, or ACT UP, founded in New York in the 1980s. Bordowitz has lived with HIV since the late 1980s, and it has fuelled his art and activism ever since, as a new show at Camden Art Centre in London demonstrates. We spoke to him about his life and work. And this episode’s Work of the Week is Rotimi Fani-Kayode’s Abiku (Born to Die) (1988), a photograph in The 80s: Photographing Britain, a show at Tate Britain in London. Fani-Kayode was a key figure in the UK’s burgeoning avant-garde photography scene in the late 1980s, but died in his early 30s in 1989 from complications relating to Aids. We talk to Jasmine Kaur Chohan, co-curator of the Tate Britain show, about the work.

Peter Hujar—Eyes Open in the Dark, Raven Row, London, 30 January-6 April

Gregg Bordowitz—There: a Feeling, Camden Art Centre, London, until 23 March

The 80s: Photographing Britain, Tate Britain, until 5 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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The Art Newspaper’s correspondent for the Middle East, Sarvy Geranpayeh, has been reporting on the effect of Israel’s military bombardment of Gaza on artists and art workers there since the beginning of the Israel-Hamas conflict in 2023. In the wake of the three-stage ceasefire that began last Sunday, she has returned to those she has spoken to over the past 16 months to hear their views on the agreement and what happens next. The Musée du Louvre in Paris this week opened a show of the great 13th-century Italian painter Cimabue. Our associate digital editor, Alexander Morrison, spoke to Thomas Bohl, the exhibition’s curator. And this episode’s Work of the Week is actually three works produced in a family business of printmakers in 17th-century Netherlands. The works, by Hendrick Goltzius, and his grandsons Theodor and Adriaen Matham, are part of a new show, A Family Affair: Artistic Dynasties in Europe (Part I, 1500–1700), at the Blanton Museum of Art, part of The University of Texas, Austin. The curator of the exhibition, Holly Borham, tells me more about this printmaking dynasty.

A New Look at Cimabue: At the Origins of Italian Painting, Musée du Louvre, Paris, 22 January – 12 May 2025

A Family Affair: Artistic Dynasties in Europe (Part I, 1500–1700), Blanton Museum of Art, The University of Texas, Austin, US, 25 January-15 June; the second part of this exhibition, covering the period 1700 to 1900, opens in June.

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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This week: the Los Angeles wildfires. The Art Newspaper’s West Coast contributing editor in LA, Jori Finkel, tells our associate digital editor, Alexander Morrison, about the devastation in Southern California, and its effect on artists and institutions. The World Monuments Fund (WMF), the independent organisation devoted to safeguarding global heritage has released its biennial World Monuments Watch, a list of 25 sites that are potentially threatened. The aim of the list is, according to the WMF to “mobilise action, build public awareness, and demonstrate how heritage can help communities confront the crucial issues of our time”. Ben Luke talks to John Darlington, the director of projects for WMF Britain, who also reflects on the future of the organisation’s project to train Syrian refugees in stonemasonry skills, in the wake of the change in government in Syria. And this episode’s Work of the Week is All About Painting in Colour: An Illustrated Book, a portfolio in two volumes made by the leading artist of the late Edo period in Japan, Katsushika Hokusai. The last of his drawing manuals, made by the artist at the very end of his life, it features in a new book, Hokusai’s Method. We talk to Ryoko Matsuba, one of the authors of the new book.

Hokusai’s Method, with texts by Kyoko Wada and Ryoko Matsuba, is published by Thames and Hudson. It is out on 23 January in the UK, and priced £35, and on 4 February in the US, priced $45.

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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A 2025 preview: Georgina Adam, our editor-at-large, tells host Ben Luke what might lie ahead for the market. And Ben is joined by Jane Morris, editor-at-large, and Gareth Harris, chief contributing editor, to select the big museum openings, biennials and exhibitions.

All shows discussed are in The Art Newspaper's The Year Ahead 2025, priced £14.99 or the equivalent in your currency. Buy it here.

Exhibitions:

Site Santa Fe International, Santa Fe, US, 28 Jun-13 Jan 2026; Liverpool Biennial, 7 Jun-14 Sep; Folkestone Triennial, 19 Jul-19 Oct; Ruth Asawa: A Retrospective, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 5 Apr-2 Sep; Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, 19 Oct-7 Feb 2026; Gabriele Münter, Guggenheim Museum, New York, 7 Nov-26 Apr 2026; Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, 4 Apr-24 Aug; Elizabeth Catlett: a Black Revolutionary Artist, Brooklyn Museum, New York, until 19 Jan; National Gallery of Art (NGA), Washington DC, 9 Mar-6 Jul; Art Institute of Chicago, US, 30 Aug-4 Jan 2026; Ithell Colquhoun, Tate Britain, London, 13 Jun-19 Oct; Abstract Erotic: Louise Bourgeois, Eva Hesse, Alice Adams, Courtauld Gallery, London, 20 Jun-14 Sep; Michaelina Wautier, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, 30 Sep-25 Jan 2026; Radical! Women Artists and Modernism, Belvedere, Vienna, 18 Jun-12 Oct; Dangerously Modern: Australian Women Artists in Europe, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 24 May-7 Sep; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 11 Oct-1 Feb 2026; Lorna Simpson: Source Notes, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 19 May-2 Nov; Amy Sherald: American Sublime, SFMOMA, to 9 Mar; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 9 Apr-Aug; National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC, 19 Sep-22 Feb 2026; Shahzia Sikander: Collective Behavior, Cincinnati Art Museum, 14 Feb-4 May; Cleveland Museum of Art, US, 14 Feb-8 Jun; Cantor Arts Center, Stanford, US, 1 Oct-25 Jan 2026; Jenny Saville: The Anatomy of Painting, National Portrait Gallery, London, 20 Jun-7 Sep; Linder: Danger Came Smiling, Hayward Gallery, London, 11 Feb-5 May; Arpita Singh, Serpentine Galleries, London, 13 Mar-27 Jul; Vija Celmins, Beyeler Collection, Basel, 15 Jun-21 Sep; An Indigenous Present, ICA/Boston, US, 9 Oct-8 Mar 2026; The Stars We Do Not See, NGA, Washington, DC, 18 Oct-1 Mar 2026; Duane Linklater, Dia Chelsea, 12 Sep-24 Jan 2026; Camden Art Centre, London, 4 Jul-21 Sep; Vienna Secession, 29 Nov-22 Feb 2026; Emily Kam Kngwarray, Tate Modern, London, 10 Jul-13 Jan 2026; Archie Moore, Queensland Gallery of Modern Art, 30 Aug-23 Aug 2026; Histories of Ecology, MASP, Sao Paulo, 5 Sep-1 Feb 2026; Jack Whitten, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 23 Mar-2 Aug; Wifredo Lam, Museum of Modern Art, Rashid Johnson, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 18 Apr-18 Jan 2026; Adam Pendleton, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC, 4 Apr-3 Jan 2027; Marie Antoinette Style, Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 20 Sep-22 Mar 2026; Leigh Bowery!, Tate Modern, 27 Feb- 31 Aug; Blitz: the Club That Shaped the 80s, Design Museum, London, 19 Sep-29 Mar 2026; Do Ho Suh, Tate Modern, 1 May-26 Oct; Picasso: the Three Dancers, Tate Modern, 25 Sep-1 Apr 2026; Ed Atkins, Tate Britain, London, 2 Apr-25 Aug; Turner and Constable, Tate Britain, 27 Nov-12 Apr 2026; British Museum: Hiroshige, 1 May-7 Sep; Watteau and Circle, 15 May-14 Sep; Ancient India, 22 May-12 Oct; Kerry James Marshall, Royal Academy of Arts, London, 20 Sep-18 Jan 2026; Kiefer/Van Gogh, Royal Academy, 28 Jun-26 Oct; Anselm Kiefer, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, 14 Feb-15 Jun; Anselm Kiefer, Van Gogh Museum, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, 7 Mar-9 Jun; Cimabue, Louvre, Paris, 22 Jan-12 May; Black Paris, Centre Pompidou, Paris, 19 Mar-30 Jun; Machine Love, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, 13 Feb-8 Jun

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