This week, now that the pro-European centrist Emmanuel Macron has defeated the far-right candidate Marine Le Pen in the French presidential election, we speak to Anaël Pigeat, editor-at-large at The Art Newspaper France, about the Macron government’s cultural record so far and what we can expect from his second term. Tate Britain has opened an exhibition of work by the late 19th- and early 20th-century British painter Walter Sickert; we take a tour of the show with one of its curators, Thomas Kennedy. And in this episode’s Work of the Week, The Art Newspaper’s associate editor, Tom Seymour, talks to Dan Leers of the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, US, about A workman lifts a drum from a boiling lye solution, March 1944, a photograph in the museum’s new exhibition, Gordon Parks in Pittsburgh, 1944/1946.Walter Sickert, Tate Britain, London, until 18 September; Petit Palais, Paris, 14 October-29 January 2023.Gordon Parks in Pittsburgh, 1944/1946, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, 30 April-7 August. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

A Venice Biennale special: we give you a flavour of the 59th edition of the Biennale which, as ever, brings a deluge of contemporary art to the historic Italian city. We talk to four artists in the national pavilions – Francis Alÿs in the Belgian pavilion, Sonia Boyce in the British pavilion, Shubigi Rao in the Singapore pavilion and Na Chainkua Reindorf in the Ghana pavilion – about their presentations and how, if at all, they relate to the idea of nationhood. Louisa Buck and Jane Morris join host Ben Luke to review the main exhibition, The Milk of Dreams, curated by Cecilia Alemani, and pick their highlights of the Biennale so far. And while most visitors to Venice this week are immersed in contemporary art, for this episode’s Work of the Week, we take a look at a masterpiece that remains exactly where it was intended to hang. The art historian Ben Street joins Ben Luke in San Giovanni Crisostomo, a church near Venice’s Rialto bridge, to look at Saints Christopher, Jerome and Louis of Toulouse, a late painting by the Venetian Renaissance artist Giovanni Bellini.Venice Biennale, 23 April-27 November.Ben Street, How to Enjoy Art: A Guide for Everyone, Yale University Press, £14.99/$20. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week: Tom Seymour talks to the photographer Edward Burtynsky as he is recognised for his Outstanding Contribution to his medium in the Sony World Photography Awards. He discusses the Russian invasion and his Ukrainian heritage. In this episode’s Work of the Week, we look at Winslow Homer’s most famous work, The Gulf Stream (1899, reworked by 1906), which is at the heart of a new show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Sylvia Yount and Stephanie Herdrich, the curators of the exhibition, discuss the making, reception and legacy of the painting. And we talk to Lisa Movius about the decision by the Nord regional government in France to suspend plans for the exhibition Matisse by Matisse—a collaboration between Musée Matisse le Cateau-Cambrésis and the private Beijing museum UCCA—over China’s supposedly neutral position on Russia’s invasion. Will other Western authorities or arts organisations follow suit?Sony World Photography Awards Exhibition 2022, Somerset House, London, until 2 May. Edward Burtynsky’s multimedia project In the Wake of Progress is at the Luminato Festival, Toronto, 11-12 June.Winslow Homer: Crosscurrents, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, until 31 July. Winslow Homer: Force of Nature, National Gallery, London, 10 September-8 January 2023. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week: Quiet as It’s Kept, the 80th edition of the Whitney Biennial, is now open to the public at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. The Art Newspaper’s associate editor Tom Seymour, Americas editor Ben Sutton and staff reporter Gabriella Angeletti gather to discuss it. As the latest incarnation of the show Afro-Atlantic Histories is unveiled at the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC, we speak to its curator, Kanitra Fletcher, about the gallery’s approach to this complex subject. And the National Gallery in London’s long-planned Raphael blockbuster, postponed due to the pandemic, is finally open, so for this episode’s Work of the Week, we speak to Tom Henry, one of the curators of the show, about the Self-Portrait with Giulio Romano (1519-20), one of the Renaissance master’s final paintings.Whitney Biennial 2022: Quiet as It’s Kept, Whitney Museum of American Art, until 5 September.Afro-Atlantic Histories, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, 10 April-17 July.Raphael, National Gallery, London, 9 April-31 July. To hear an in-depth discussion with Hugo Chapman, keeper of prints and drawings at the British Museum, about Raphael’s wider career, his precocious brilliance, his rivalry with Michelangelo, and his influence and legacy, listen to the episode of this podcast from 22 May 2020. (https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-week-in-art/id1280469178?i=1000475387725) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week: the Art Basel and UBS Global Art Market Report 2022 is out—is the market’s recovery as good as it sounds? We talk to Melanie Gerlis, art market columnist for The Art Newspaper and the Financial Times, about the sixth edition of the market report, what the headline figures tell us and what we can read between the lines. As the exhibition Hideouts: The Architecture of Survival, opens at the Zacheta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw—focusing on the spaces in Poland and Ukraine used by Holocaust survivors to escape Nazi persecution—we talk to the artist behind it, Natalia Romik. Though long planned, the show has gained a troubling topicality as the Russian invasion and destruction of Ukraine continues. And in this episode’s Work of the Week, coinciding with the 150th anniversary of Piet Mondrian’s birth, we discuss his painting Victory Boogie Woogie (1942-44). Caro Verbeek, the co-curator of Mondrian Moves, an exhibition opening this week at the Kunstmuseum den Haag in the Hague, the Netherlands, tells us about the feverish creation and unfinished nature of the Dutch artist’s final work.Natalia Romik’s exhibition, Hideouts: The Architecture of Survival, Zachęta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw, until 17 July; TRAFO Center for Contemporary Art, Szczecin, Poland, 4 August-6 NovemberMondrian Moves, Kunstmuseum den Haag, the Hague, Netherlands, 2 April-25 September. Mondrian Evolution, Fondation Beyeler, Basel, Switzerland, 5 June-9 October; K20, Düsseldorf, Germany, 29 October-10 February 2023 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We talk to Max Hollein, director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, about the new plans for the museum’s wing of modern and contemporary art, including the appointment of the architect Frida Escobedo in place of David Chipperfield. As The Art Newspaper is about to publish its annual museum attendance survey, showing that visitors are beginning slowly to return to museums after the height of the pandemic, we ask Hollein how the vision for the museum has changed following the events of the past two years. Plus, Aimee Dawson talks to the curator Sam Bardaouil about the exhibition Beirut and the Golden Sixties: A Manifesto of Fragility at the Gropius Bau in Berlin. And in this episode’s Work of the Week, as the Menil Collection in Houston, Texas, opens a major Meret Oppenheim survey, the show’s curator Natalie Dupêcher discusses Oppenheim’s Surrealist object Ma gouvernante – My Nurse – Mein Kindermädchen (1936): a pair of white heels on a silver platter, trussed like a chicken.The Art Newspaper’s visitor attendance survey is in the April print edition, and online next week at theartnewspaper.com, or on our app for iOS and Android, which you can get from the App Store or Google Play.Beirut and the Golden Sixties: A Manifesto of Fragility, Gropius Bau, Berlin, until 12 June.Meret Oppenheim: My Exhibition, Menil Collection, Houston, until 18 September; Museum of Modern Art, New York, 30 October-4 March 2023 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Donatello in Florence, the Biennale of Sydney and Eduardo Navarro’s seed installationThis week, as the Palazzo Strozzi and Museo Nazionale del Bargello in Florence present a survey of Donatello, one of the greatest of all Italian Renaissance masters, we talk to Arturo Galansino, the Strozzi’s Director General, and Paola D’Agostino, Director of the Bargello museum, about the show. The Biennale of Sydney in Australia has just opened, with the theme of rīvus, meaning stream in Latin. José Roca, the Biennale’s artistic director, and Alessandro Pelizzon, co-founder of the Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature, discuss the Biennale’s concept, bringing rivers and other “aqueous beings”, as Roca and his curatorial colleagues call them, into dialogue with artists, architects, designers, scientists, and communities. What does it mean if you grant rivers and other natural forms rights? And this episode’s Work of the Week also explores nature, ecology and the relationship between humans and natural phenomena. We speak to curator Bárbara Rodriguez Muñoz about Photosynthetics, an installation by Eduardo Navarro in Rooted Beings, the latest exhibition at London’s Wellcome Collection.Donatello: The Renaissance, Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi and the Museo Nazionale del Bargello in Florence, 19 March-31 July. Gemäldegalerie, Berlin, 2 September-8 January 2023. The Victoria and Albert Museum in London will stage its variation of the exhibition in 2023The Biennale of Sydney: Rīvus continues until 13 June. And José and Alessandro will take part in a panel discussion on 10 May titled Reclaiming Rivers’ Rights. Find out more at biennaleofsydney.artRooted Beings, Wellcome Collection, London, 24 March-29 August Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week: as more than two million refugees leave war-torn Ukraine, what can the arts do? Counterpoints Arts is a charity that works with refugee artists and creates programmes in a range of artforms on the subject of migration and displacement in the UK and beyond. Their mission is underpinned by a belief that arts can inspire social change and enhance the inclusion and cultural integration of refugees and migrants. We talk to a producer at Counterpoints Arts, Tom Green. The Art Newspaper’s deputy digital editor Aimee Dawson is at the Art Dubai fair, and talks about its new digital section, focusing on NFTs, virtual reality and more, with the artist Gretchen Andrew and Anna Seaman, a curator at Morrow Collective, an NFT curatorial platform that is participating in the fair. And in this episode’s Work of the Week, as Summer, an exhibition dedicated to the work of the late Cuban-American artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres, opens at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Toronto, its curator Rui Mateus Amaral discusses "Untitled" (Golden) (1995), a key work in the show and one of the last pieces Gonzalez-Torres created before his death in 1996.Counterpoints Arts | Together with Refugees | Refugee WeekArt Dubai, until 13 MarchArticle on the Metaverse by The Art Newspaper’s XR panelFelix Gonzalez-Torres: Summer, Museum of Contemporary Art, Toronto, until 31 JulyFelix Gonzalez-Torres’s "Untitled" (Golden) (1995) at the Felix Gonzalez-Torres FoundationA brush with… Roni Horn, in which Roni Horn discusses her relationship with Felix Gonzalez-Torres Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week: following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, we talk to Svitlana Biedarieva, a Ukrainian art historian, artist and curator, about the community of artists in her home country, their work since the Maidan, or Revolution of Dignity in 2014, and how they are responding to the events of recent days. Also on Ukraine, Tom Seymour talks to the photographer Mark Neville, who has been based in the Ukrainian capital Kyiv for the past 18 months and left the city last week, about a photojournalistic series he made in Ukraine, about ethical approaches to reportage and about the effects of documenting war-torn countries. As a book is published featuring Chris Burden’s unrealised projects, we talk to Jori Finkel about the American performance and installation artist’s extraordinary imagination. And in this episode’s Work of the Week, Jane Alison, curator of Postwar Modern: New Art in Britain 1945-65 at the Barbican Art Gallery, London, discusses one of the key works in the show: the Goa-born artist F.N. Souza’s Mr Sebastian (1955).The Art Newspaper’s reporting on the Russian invasion of UkraineSvitlana Biedarieva, art historian, artist and curatorThe artists mentioned by Svitlana:Piotr ArmianovskiYevgenia BelorusetsAlevtina Kakhidze, instagram: @truealevtinaRazom for UkraineMark Neville’s Stop Tanks With Books, published by Nazraeli Press, £50 /$60Eight photographers you need to follow in Ukraine by Tom SeymourPoetic Practical: The Unrealized Work of Chris Burden, published by Gagosian, $120Postwar Modern: New Art in Britain 1945-65, Barbican Art Gallery, London, 26 June Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

As an exhibition opens at the Whitechapel Gallery in London focusing on artists’ studios over the last century, we take an in-depth look at the subject. The artist, critic and activist William Powhida discusses the Artist Studio Affordability Project in New York and how developers and gentrification have forced artists’ communities to breaking point. We take a tour of the Whitechapel exhibition with the gallery’s director Iwona Blazwick, and explore works by Kerry James Marshall, Paul McCarthy, Laboratoire Agit’Art, Alina Szapocznikow, Tehching Hsieh and Egon Schiele, among others. And in this episode’s Work of the Week, the photographer Eamonn McCabe, who has made a series of photographs of artists in their studios, talks about his visit to Paula Rego’s space in Camden Town, London, in 2004. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.