Artists

The Basel contemporary art fair last week defied forecasts of a market slowdown, with wealthy collectors buying works with seven or eight-figure price tags.

At its VIP day on June 13, Zurich's Hauser and Wirth gallery sold a spider by Franco-American sculptor Louise Bourgeois for $22.5 million.

Henk Schiffmaker's needle whirrs as he tattoos the familiar lines of an elephant on Lilian Rachmaran's back.

"Highbrow to lowbrow" is how the famous Dutch tattoo artist describes his latest project, inking sketches by Rembrandt van Rijn onto the skin of visitors to the building the Golden Age master once called home. Or call it high art to body art.

A Rembrandt self-portrait bought from the Rothschild family with 150 million euros ($162 million) of Dutch state cash went on display at Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum on June 15.

The Netherlands agreed to buy "The Standard-Bearer" with public money in 2022, after Paris cleared its sale despite the painting being considered as a "national treasure" in France.

Paintings created by the Slovenian painter, graphic artist, illustrator, and sculptor Tone Kralj (1900-1975) during the Second World War are on display at the National Museum of Contemporary History in what is the museum's largest temporary exhibition this year.

France's Francoise Gilot, who died on June 6 aged 101, survived what she called the "hell" of being Spanish artist Pablo Picasso's mistress and muse to become a renowned artist in her own right.

The Picasso Museum in Paris confirmed her death to AFP, after the New York Times reported Gilot had passed away following recent heart and lung ailments.

Fifty years after art icon Pablo Picasso's death, his legacy is reassessed by comedian Hannah Gadsby in a Brooklyn Museum exhibition in New York, this time through a contemporary, feminist lens.

In her 2018 Netflix special "Nanette," Gadsby expressed "hate" for the Spanish master of Cubism and the creator of works like "Guernica" and "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon."

President Vladimir Putin's decision to move one of Russia's holiest icons from a museum to a Moscow cathedral highlights his growing reliance on the Church as the Ukraine war drags on, but has also raised fears about the safety of the fragile artifact.

Danish painters in the 19th century may have turned to an unusual source for some of their supplies: breweries.

Researchers examined paintings from the Danish Golden Age and found traces of yeast and grains. That suggests painters were turning to byproducts from local breweries to prepare canvases, they reported Wednesday in the journal Science Advances.

The world-famous landscape painting "Insel im Attersee," Islands on the Lake Attersee, by the Australian painter Gustav Klimt has been purchased for $ 53.2 million at an auction organized by Sotheby's Auction House.

A Japanese collector on May 17 paid $53.2 million for the purchase of the early 20th-centru painting, the auction house in New York announced.

"In 2022, freedom of expression in Bulgaria was subjected to new abuses in the conditions of a full-scale war of Russia against Ukraine.