ArtReview

Jasper Johns’s paintings look like they are telling simple truths, but often hide more than they reveal Sometime between 1954 and 1955, during the interval between Abstract Expressionism’s dominance and the emergent vanguard of Pop art, Jasper Johns – who was in his mid-twenties and had recently destroyed all his earlier work – painted Flag.

Photo: Laszlo212 / Wikimedia, CC BY-SA 4.0 The artist Lucien Smith has died aged 37. Based in New York, Smith graduated from the Cooper Union with a degree in fine arts in 2011. He gained early market success, especially for his abstract paintings that came to be known as representative of ‘zombie formalism’ after critic Walter Robinson coined the term in 2014. His practice also encompassed films and sculptural installations.

Lonnie G. Bunch III, Secretary of the Smithsonian. Photo: Michael Barnes/Smithsonian Institution Archives Lonnie Bunch has resigned as secretary of the Smithsonian Institute, bringing to the end a tenure marred by firefighting attacks on the US institution by the Trump administration. Bunch admitted to the New York Times, ‘It has been stressful’.

Against the cultural economy’s demand for constant productivity, a group of works by Chicago-based conceptual artists invites viewers to slow down Three unopened ‘gifts’ addressed to the late Pope.L sit overhead on wooden shelves, slightly out of reach. The first, Package Received But Never Opened #75 (2015), a brown-paper-and-plastic-wrapped box, teeters at the edge, beside Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle’s hand-carved ash-wood Chair for poet (2025). Both works remain tentative, awaiting an addressee.

Jenny Holzer, Survival, 1985, electronic sign, 6.1 x 12.2 m. Installation view Times Square, New York, 1985. Photo: John Marchael. © the artist, member Artists Rights Society (ARS) Artists Andy Goldsworthy and Jenny Holzer are among the recipients of the Praemium Imperiale, awarded by the Japan Art Association. Established in 1988 and presented annually in the name of the late Prince Takamatsu, each recipient receives a gold medal and 15 million yen (£70,000).

The artist worked under a regime that could – and did – imprison her for her art. In the current strange climate of censorship, algorithmic surveillance and resurgent authoritarianism, her work finds new, rarefied air Gabriele Stötzer’s photo series Stegreifspiele – Das Loch (Improvisation Games – The Hole, 1982) begins with the artist posing nude in front of a white wall, raising one hand to her face and forming a small circle between her thumb and index finger, like the sight of a gun.

Far from being kitsch or sentimental, Ukrainian Lessons reads best when the author steps away from her journalistic position Contrary to the subtitle, Ukrainian Lessons is not a guide to visual arts in a time of war. Rather, it’s a travelogue of sorts, in which a British journalist and chief culture writer for The Guardian travels the country and meets writers, poets, film directors and artists.

Our editors on the exhibitions they’re looking forward to around the world this month – from Bangkok and Berlin to Yogyakarta and Tokyo Nicholas Cullinan, director of the British Museum, and Hélène Tréheux-Duchêne, ambassador of France to the United Kingdom, at the arrival of the Bayeux Tapestry at the British Museum. © Trustees of the British Museum, London London The Bayeux Tapestry This September, the British Museum is rolling out the carpet: the Bayeux Tapestry.

You could be cleaning out storage units, taking inventory, digitising papers and creating databases – or just seducing their landlord Before he died in 1989, the queer experimental filmmaker Jack Smith had turned his downtown apartment into the set of a feature film he never made, titled ‘Sinbad in a Rented World’. Judging by footage from 1990, Smith liked to write on walls; he’d painted his ceiling blue and left behind campy murals of goddesses with plaster cones for breasts.

Courtesy Fundación Paiz, Guatemala City Cuauhtémoc Medina has been appointed as curator of the 25th Bienal de Arte Paiz, which will take place in Guatemala City and Antigua Guatemala from November 2027 to February 2028, the Fundación Paiz has announced. Medina is a Mexican art critic, curator and historian. He has been a researcher at the Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) since 1993.