David Hockney’s Serpentine exhibition becomes the most visited in the gallery’s history.
David Hockney’s exhibition “A Year in Normandie and Some Other Thoughts about Painting” has become the best-attended show in Serpentine’s 56-year history, drawing roughly 300,000 visitors during its run at Serpentine North in London from March 12 through August 23. Admission was free, and the show marked Hockney’s first presentation at the institution. A large-scale printed mural in the garden accompanies the exhibition and remains on view through September 20. The show featured five new still lifes and portraits alongside the 300-foot frieze A Year in Normandie (2020–21). In a statement issued around the time of the opening, Hockney reflected on art’s capacity to counter despair, expressing his belief that new ways of seeing can lead to new ways of feeling, and that painting has the power to change the world.
Curator Cuauhtémoc Medina to lead Guatemala’s Bienal de Arte Paiz in 2027.
The Fundación Paiz para la Educación y la Cultura has named Mexican curator and critic Cuauhtémoc Medina to curate the 25th edition of the Bienal de Arte Paiz, set to run November 2027 through February 2028 across Guatemala City and Antigua. Founded in 1978, the Bienal is Central America’s largest contemporary art exhibition, and this edition will coincide with the 50th anniversary of the Fundación Paiz. Medina brings extensive biennial experience, having curated the 2018–19 Shanghai Biennale and Manifesta 9 in Genk, Belgium in 2012. He served as chief curator at Mexico City’s Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo from 2013 to 2024 and was the inaugural associate curator of Latin American Art at Tate Modern from 2002 to 2008. Foundation director Sonia Hurtarte told The Art Newspaper that this milestone edition should reconsider what a biennial can accomplish today, especially one speaking from Central America to the global art world.
Japanese architect Kengo Kuma honored with Andrée Putman Lifetime Achievement Award.
Kengo Kuma has been named the recipient of the Andrée Putman Lifetime Achievement Award, which we will receive at the 2027 Créateurs Design Awards. The Japanese architect is being honored for a career spanning more than three decades, marked by a distinctive approach to materiality, craft, and the reinterpretation of Japanese architectural traditions. Born in Yokohama in 1954, Kuma founded Kengo Kuma & Associates in Tokyo in 1990 and later expanded with a Paris office in 2008. His body of work spans timber, stone, light, and screens, often favoring porous building envelopes that dissolve the boundary between architecture and landscape. He has also taught at the University of Tokyo since 2009. Kuma joins a distinguished roster of past honorees, including Norman Foster, Tadao Ando, Gaetano Pesce, Robert A.M. Stern, and Christian de Portzamparc.
In Venice, the DVF Awards became an unplanned tribute to Gloria Steinem.
The 17th edition of the DVF Awards took place Thursday, September 3 at Venice’s Teatro Goldoni, hosted by Diane von Furstenberg. The event took on additional gravity after news broke that day of Gloria Steinem’s death at 92; von Furstenberg dedicated the evening to the feminist icon, who had herself received a DVF Award in 2014. Founded in 2010 with the Diller-von Furstenberg Family Foundation, the awards recognize women advancing the lives of others, with each honoree receiving $100,000 for their nonprofit work. This year’s honorees included actress and activist Jane Fonda, French survivor and justice advocate Gisèle Pelicot, Barbados Prime Minister Mia Amor Mottley, photojournalist Lynsey Addario, and Kenyan educator Wawira Njiru, founder of the school-feeding initiative Food4Education.
Missing since 1978, two Eastman Johnson works are found and returned.
Two paintings by American artist Eastman Johnson, stolen from New York galleries in 1978, have been recovered nearly 50 years later, according to Connecticut’s Shannon’s Fine Art Auctioneers. Mary and Her Lamb (1877) and The Young Mother (ca. 1872–73) had gone missing from Kenneth Lux Gallery and Hirschl & Adler Galleries, respectively, until antiques dealer Brandon Levine spotted them in an estate collection earlier this year. Suspecting the works were by Johnson, Levine consulted the artist’s online catalog raisonné, compiled by Patricia Hills and Abigael MacGibeny, which listed both paintings as stolen. After confirming this with the Art Loss Register, Levine and Shannon’s owner Sandra Germain contacted the family that had inherited the works, who agreed to return them. Germain then tracked down the original owners, Hirschl & Adler’s Stuart Feld, who recalled the theft vividly, and the descendants of Kenneth Lux, including his son Daniel. Germain estimates the recovered paintings’ combined value at over $200,000, noting a similar Johnson work sold for $108,000 at Bonham’s in 2024.
Attractive Distractions:
Richelle Ellis’s new book, Inploration, charts the art world’s fascination with space and Earth.
Paul Smith and Barbour’s third collaboration heads to the Scottish Highlands.
Brunello Cucinelli celebrates 73rd birthday in Paris with a flagship opening and a film premiere.
Inside Detroit’s 16th annual Month of Design: “the design scene nobody’s talking about.”
