Our weekly news roundup is an extension of Paint Drippings, which drops first in The Back Room, a lively recap funneling only the week’s must-know art industry intel into a nimble read you’ll actually enjoy. Artnet News Pro members get exclusive access—subscribe now to receive this in your inbox every Friday.
Art Fairs
– The Aspen Art Fair will return to the Hotel Jerome from July 29 to August 1 for its third edition, bringing together more than 35 exhibitors, among them newcomers such as Albertz Benda (New York, Los Angeles), Detroit’s Library Street Collective, and Chicago dealer Monique Meloche. The 2026 fair marks the first edition under director Kelly Cornell, who joined earlier this year while continuing to lead the Dallas Art Fair.
Auctions
– Sotheby’s May marquee sales are estimated to bring in $690.4 million to $942.5 million during the auction house’s second season at the Breuer, making it one of the strongest May lineups in recent years. The low estimate alone is roughly 70 percent higher than the total hammer price achieved in May 2025, according to the house. The top lot of its six sales is a Mark Rothko painting, estimated at $70 million–$100 million, from the collection of dealer Robert Mnuchin, which goes under the hammer on May 14.
Mark Rothko, Brown and Blacks in Reds (1957). Courtesy of Sotheby’s.
– Christie’s is set to rake in between $1 billion and $1.5 billion across the 769 lots featured in its nine marquee-week sales in New York, beginning May 18. The collection of magazine magnate S.I. Newhouse accounts for nearly half of that figure—the 16-lot single-owner sale is expected to fetch $462 million, led by a massive 1948 Jackson Pollock drip painting that’s estimated to fetch around $100 million.
– La Route de Vétheuil, effet de neige (1879) by Claude Monet is the top lot of Phillips’s Modern and contemporary evening sale on May 19, with an estimate of $7 million–$10 million and backed by a guarantee. The auction house expects to bring in between $108.7 million and $157 million across the 311 lots in its evening and day sales.
– Yoshitomo Nara’s Words Mean Nothing at All (2012) will headline Bonhams’s 20th & 21st Century art evening sale on May 20, held at the auction house’s new U.S. flagship at 111 West 57th Street in New York. The painting by the Japanese art star is estimated to sell for $4 million–$6 million.
Yoshitomo Nara, Words Mean Nothing at All (2012). Courtesy of Bonhams.
– Banksy’s Girl and Balloon on Found Landscape (2012) is headed to auction through Fair Warning in a rare live sale at Tiffany & Co.’s flagship store in New York on May 20. The work, consigned by a private collector and never previously exhibited publicly, carries a $13 million–$18 million estimate—among the highest ever placed on a work by the British street artist. (Artnet News)
Galleries
– David Zwirner now reps the Robert Therrien estate after nearly 30 years of showing with Gagosian; conceptual artist and writer Jill Magid has joined Olney Gleason; and Hirschl & Adler Modern has added landscape painter Tula Telfair to its roster.
Robert Therrien’s Under the Table (1994). Photo: David L. Ryan/The Boston Globe via Getty Images.
Museums and Institutions
– A new contemporary art foundation, Tova, based in Geneva, will spotlight Kazakh artists. Founded by Togzhan Izbassarova, wife of Chanel heir David Wertheimer, the organization will show works by Saule Suleimenova and Sayan Baigaliyev at the Berggruen Foundation’s Casa dei Tre Oci space on Venice’s Giudecca Island this summer. (Glitz)
– Speaking of Chanel, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation has launched a new international curatorial fellowship with the fashion house’s Culture Fund. The program, announced in Venice on May 5, will support M.A.- and Ph.D.-level curators and researchers working across both the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice.
Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice.
– The Louvre’s new director, Christophe Leribault, wants to reduce the embattled museum’s contemporary art acquisition budget. Currently, the institution is required to allocate 20 percent of ticket sales to buy artworks; Leribault has proposed lowering this to 12 percent and using the difference to fund much-needed building renovations. (Artnet News)
– The Brandywine Conservancy & Museum of Art in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, has unveiled plans for an approximately $100 million campus transformation and expansion project. The initiative includes a new 40,000-square-foot museum building designed by the Japanese firm Kengo Kuma & Associates—marking the architect’s first museum project in the U.S.
Legal
– France has officially passed a landmark law allowing the restitution of cultural artifacts looted during the colonial era, fulfilling a promise President Emmanuel Macron first made in 2017. The legislation makes France the first European country to adopt a universal legal framework for returning objects illicitly acquired and held in national collections, marking a major shift in longstanding protections around the inalienability of public museum holdings. (Le Monde)
– A South Korean appeals court has convicted former prosecutor Kim Sang-min in a bribery case involving a Lee Ufan painting allegedly gifted to former first lady Kim Keon Hee. Prosecutors said the roughly $95,000 artwork was offered in exchange for political support ahead of the 2024 parliamentary elections. The ruling overturns Kim’s earlier acquittal; the court sentenced him to two years in prison, suspended for three years, on the bribery charges, and a separate one-year suspended sentence tied to illegal political donation. (Chosun Daily)
Biennials
– The Kochi Biennale Foundation has tapped artist and curator Kader Attia as the curator of the seventh edition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale.
Kader Attia. Photo by Camille Millerand. Courtesy of the artist.
Awards
– Indonesian multimedia artist Dian Suci has won the 10th Max Mara Art Prize for Women. The award includes a six-month residency in Italy to develop a new project, which will debut at Museum MACAN in Jakarta in 2027 before traveling to Italy’s Collezione Maramotti.