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Open Invitational, the international exhibition platform dedicated to progressive art studios and artists with disabilities, has this week arrived in Basel, bringing with it a show that challenges preconceptions of “outsider art” and instead places its works firmly within the context of the contemporary art world.

David Hockney was an enthusiast. He loved so many things (cigarettes, good-looking men, restaurants, opera, Picasso…). His great gift, and the secret to his enormous popularity, was his infectious communication of such passions, not just in conversation (he was a fabulous talker, fueled by a sly sense of humor, a wide-ranging knowledge and a curiosity about everything, including you), but in his art. A Hockney painting is marked by immediacy. You grasp at once what he is getting at.

Away from the contemporary art fair, our editors have selected an octet of the must-see shows in and around Basel, including a look at 19th Century queerness, paintings banned by the Nazis, and Morse code on the drums. Helen Frankenthaler. Untitled (on 21st Street) (1951). Oil on paper. © 2026 Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, Inc. / ProLitteris, Zurich. Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, New York. Dan Bradica, courtesy Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, New York.

Following almost three years without a permanent home, Jewish Museum London has announced plans to open an interim public exhibition space in the capital later this week. The modest venue, titled Two Rooms by Jewish Museum London, is a stepping stone towards a more secure future for the institution and its collection, which includes around 35,000 artworks and objects related to Jewish social history.

In Ikram Abdulkadir’s photographs, young Black Muslim women are often framed in close-up portraits, their gazes lowered or averted, suspended against softly blurred, desaturated backgrounds. The clarity of her photographs, almost commercial at first glance, quickly shifts into something more unsettled: a quiet tension between surface and depth, where the everyday edges into the ritualistic and there is a stillness that reveals the artist’s tenderness and restraint.

Alma Allen, the Mexico-based sculptor controversially selected to represent the United States at this year’s Venice Biennale, has this week pushed back against his critics, claiming that he has been bullied and blacklisted since taking up the project. Allen was announced as the US pavilion artist in November last year, after a different artist and curator team’s project fell through following the departure of their institutional sponsor and alleged political interference.

The Gwangju Biennale Foundation has announced plans to introduce an open call for the artistic director of its 17th edition, marking a significant departure from the appointment system that has shaped the South Korean exhibition since its founding. The move, which coincides with the biennale’s 30th anniversary in 2028, is intended to mark what the foundation described to local media as a “turning point that requires new changes”.

David Hockney, the renowned British painter whose work transformed 20th-century art, died peacefully at home yesterday at the age of 88, one month short of his 89th birthday, his publicist confirmed.

At Cao Fei’s solo exhibition Testimonies to the Near Future at the Kunstmuseum in Basel, I spotted the multimedia artist on the third floor, jumping gleefully for a photoshoot in the pink-and-blue ball pit area. I spotted her again later, this time dancing with an inflatable matryoshka doll, part of another installation.

Artists, curators and other cultural workers in as many as 20 Italian cities are expected to walk out tomorrow following calls from unions and grassroots organisations for a sector-wide strike. The coalition of 19 groups behind the action is demanding improvements to working conditions, higher wages and an end to “artwashing practices that use the language of art to normalise war and occupation”.