The Year Ahead 2026: the big shows and the key openings

As protests engulf Paris, the Art Basel fair opened this week in the French capital and then it was announced that the fair would conclude on Friday, and not open as scheduled this weekend. The Art Newspaper’s global editor-in-chief, Ben Sutton, and our chief contributing editor, Gareth Harris, visited the fair before the announcement of the weekend closure and we hear what they made of it and the various satellite events and exhibitions around it. In Latin America, Brazil goes to the polls this weekend amid a so-called “blue wave” in which rightwing governments have come to power, often with the support of the US president, Donald Trump. Culture—and culture wars—have been central to their message and Ben Luke talks to our correspondent based in Buenos Aires, Mercedes Ezquiaga, about the weaponisation of the arts and heritage across the continent. And this episode’s Work of the Week is the “Blue China” Celestial Map by Yunyou Sanren, made in 1822. It is part of Night Maps, an exhibition at the Warburg Institute in London. Our digital editor, Alexander Morrison, spoke to John Tresch, one of the curators of the exhibition, about the work.

It’s Frieze week in London, and as usual we take the opportunity to take the temperature of the market in London, and more widely, at the fair. Joining Ben Luke in the tent in Regent’s Park is The Art Newspaper’s art market editor, Kabir Jhala. At Tate Modern, the annual commission for the Turbine Hall is Hold, a work by the Beirut-born artist Tarek Atoui, and Ben visits Tate Modern to talk to him. And this episode’s Work of the Week is Francesco di Giorgio’s Deposition of Christ from the Cross with a Group of Donors (Federico da Montefeltro and His Family), a bronze relief made in 1473–74. It is one of the highlights of an exhibition that opened this week at The Frick in New York, Siena: The Art of Bronze, 1450–1500. Ben talks to the curator of the exhibition, Giulio Dalvit.

Saturday, 10 October, marks the first anniversary of the ceasefire in Gaza. It has not put an end to the bloodshed, with figures released in August by the United Nations Human Rights Office stating that more than 1,200 Palestinians have been killed by Israel since last October. The Art Newspaper’s reporter Sarvy Geranpayeh has been reporting on the lives of Palestinian artists since soon after the first Israeli bombings in Gaza in October 2023, following the Hamas attacks in Israel on 7 October. She joins Ben Luke to discuss her latest conversations with four Gazan artists who have all experienced different levels of trauma, grief and displacement. A stunning new survey exhibition of the work of the US painter Robert Ryman opened this week at the Barbican Art Gallery in London, and Ben visits the gallery to talk to Wells Fray-Smith, the exhibition’s curator. And this episode’s Work of the Week is The Great Room (2020-ongoing) by the US artist Katherine Hubbard, the latest iteration of which was unveiled this week at Studio Voltaire in London. The Great Room responds through different forms of photographic work to the effects of LATE, a progressive brain disease, on Hubbard’s mother Antonette Berger, and the emotional experience of packing up a home in preparation for a move into residential care. Ben talks to Katherine about the work.

The French painter Auguste Renoir continues to divide critical opinion, something acknowledged by the curators of the new exhibition, Renoir and Love, at the National Gallery in London. But he remains enormously popular: the Gallery announced ahead of the show that it had broken records for advanced ticket sales. So what does the exhibition tell us about Renoir’s place in the radical developments in art in Paris between the 1860s and 1880s? Ben Luke visits the National Gallery to talk to Chiara di Stefano, its co-curator. In Belgium, the long-awaited Kanal Brussels, the museum of modern and contemporary art and architecture, established and funded by the Brussels-Capital Region and housed in a spectacular former Citroën garage, has become a political football, with debates over its future funding. Ben speaks to Senay Boztas, The Art Newspaper’s correspondent based in Amsterdam, about the latest developments. And this episode’s Work of the Week is Seated Sarong Figure (1938) by Ronald Moody. The work features in an exhibition at Orleans House Gallery in Twickenham, London, called Sculpting Life. Ben talks to the artist and curator Kedisha Coakley, who has made a new film about Moody for the exhibition.

At the Grand Palais in Paris a new exhibition explores Paul Cezanne’s influence on artists from his own time to now. In Paris, Ben Luke speaks to Xavier Rey, the director of the Musée National d’Art Moderne at the Centre Pompidou, who is one of four curators of the exhibition, Cezanne and Us. In New York, the Guggenheim has just opened Taryn Simon’s latest project, called Father Country I Do Love You. It is the first solo exhibition by an artist whose principal medium is photography to be staged in the museum’s celebrated rotunda and, remarkably, the largest display of new work ever staged at the Guggenheim. The Art Newspaper’s editor-in-chief, Ben Sutton, speaks to Taryn Simon about the show. And this episode’s Work of the Week is René Magritte’s Le Plaisir (Pleasure) (1946), a gouache on paper which is part of an exhibition at Gagosian in London called This Is Still Not a Pipe: The Afterlife of Magritte. The exhibition’s co-curator is Jasper Sharp and our digital editor, Alexander Morrison, went to the gallery to talk to him.