Editorial from Exhibo and official announcements from Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).
Editorial coverage on Exhibo
Hong Kong's leading contemporary venue expands its institutional network and outlines a dense programme of exhibitions and academic initiatives
As M+ celebrates five years in West Kowloon, director Suhanya Raffel and board chairman Paulo Pong detail a new transatlantic partnership, upcoming film restorations, and structural reforms aimed at reshaping museum practice across Asia.
From São Paulo’s 1922 Week and Antropofagia to Torres-García, Madí, Lam and neo-concrete colour: modernisms south of the US border
Latin American modernism is a cluster of twentieth-century programmes, not one school. This guide maps Brazilian Antropofagia, Río de la Plata constructivism, Caribbean Afro-Atlantic painting and later concrete and kinetic work, with named museum holdings and a visit chronology.
Post-revolutionary public fresco in Mexico: Vasconcelos, los tres grandes, named walls from the National Palace to Detroit and Dartmouth
After 1920 Mexico paid painters to put national history on ministry and school walls. This guide covers Rivera, Orozco and Siqueiros, fresco versus industrial paint, United States commissions, critics, and a visit table for the National Palace, Detroit Institute of Arts, Dartmouth and the Polyforum.
How nineteenth-century European painters built an “Orient” of harems, mosques and deserts, and how Said and museums rewrite that gaze
Orientalism in Western art names European pictures of North Africa and the Middle East shaped by empire, travel and studio fantasy. This guide traces Ingres, Delacroix, Gérôme and Matisse through dated museum works, then follows Said, Nochlin, and museum debates on display, provenance and restitution.
Hot beeswax, damar resin and pigment on rigid panels: Fayum portraits, Jasper Johns, and how artists fuse, layer and conserve wax paint today
Encaustic painting binds dry pigment in heated beeswax (often with damar resin), applies it to a rigid support, and fuses each layer with a heat gun or iron. This guide walks materials, studio safety, layering and fusing, Roman Fayum portraits, Jasper Johns's Flag, and what makes wax film fail in heat or UV.
Canvas, panel, linen, paper, metal and wall: how painting supports are built, prepared, and why the wrong substrate fails decades later
A painting support is the surface paint adheres to: stretched linen, oak panel, watercolour paper, copper sheet, or lime plaster on a wall. This guide maps the main support types, how sizing and gesso prepare them, linen versus cotton weave, stretcher bars and panel cradling, named works in major museums, typical failure modes, and what each option costs in a studio today without turning into a gear catalogue.
Pixels, code, screens and files: how born-digital work is made, stored, shown and kept alive in museums
Digital art is visual art whose making or presentation depends on digital technology: raster and vector files, software, screens, projection, or custom code. This page covers tools, file types, display hardware, born-digital versus digitised work, and how conservators preserve software-based pieces, with Paik, Schwartz and teamLab as case studies.
When paint, paste, print and found objects share one surface: how mixed media works as technique and label, from Cubist paste to Neo-Dada combines and contemporary assemblage
Mixed media art combines two or more materials or techniques in a single work so the label lists more than one substance or process. This guide defines the term against collage and assemblage, traces adhesive chemistry and layering order, reads six museum objects from Picasso to Rauschenberg, and notes how composite works fail in storage.
Thick paint, knife and brush: binders, drying chemistry, Van Gogh to de Kooning, cracking modes, and studio costs today
Impasto is the practice of laying paint so thick that brush or knife marks stand in relief on the support. This guide stays with technique: how binders carry weight, how workshops sequence layers, who pushed the method from Rembrandt's lead white to de Kooning's scraped surfaces, and why conservators treat peaks differently from flat film.
Relief, intaglio, lithography, screenprint and monotype: how each matrix transfers ink, where it fails, and museum examples from Dürer to Warhol
Printmaking is the transfer of an image from a prepared matrix to paper or fabric, usually in multiples called an edition. This guide maps the main process types (relief, intaglio, planographic, stencil), walks through materials and steps for each, and points to museum examples you can still see on the wall.
Opaque watercolour on gum arabic and chalk, from Turner highlights to Matisse cut-outs, plus designer versus artist ranges
Gouache is water-based paint made opaque with extra pigment and white filler, bound in gum arabic like watercolour but drying to a flat matte film you can rewet. This guide covers chemistry, designer versus artist ranges, working method, history, named museum works, conservation risks, and what tubes cost today.
Binders, drying chemistry, glazing and conservation through museum examples, from van Eyck’s oil films to post-war acrylic on canvas
Oil paint dries by oxidation; acrylic dries as water leaves a polymer film. That difference governs layering, glazing, studio safety and how conservators clean ageing surfaces. This comparison walks binders, process, mid-century adoption, named museum works, and typical material costs without turning into a shopping list.
Cut paper, glue and found print on a support: how collage works as technique and object, from Cubist papiers collés to digital layers
Collage glues fragments of the visible world into a new picture plane. This guide defines the technique against photomontage and assemblage, traces paper chemistry and adhesives, walks a studio sequence from support to seal, reads six museum works from Picasso to Bearden, and notes how acidic glue and cheap print stock fail in storage.
Hue, mixing and the colour wheel as studio grammar, read through six named paintings from Titian through to Bridget Riley.
Colour theory in art is the set of looking rules studios use for hue, mixing and harmony. This guide maps subtractive and additive systems, the wheel, complementary and analogous schemes, and six museum works, then shows how to read a palette on the wall without sliding into symbolism or pigment lore.
Visual movement as the path the eye takes: implied line, repetition and rhythm, read on six named museum works rather than a timeline of styles.
Classroom posters mix three jobs under one word: the route looking takes, a depicted action, and a historical style. This guide keeps the first job. It tests implied line, repetition and optical pulse on six named objects, from the Louvre’s Nike of Samothrace to Bridget Riley’s Movement in Squares.
Wholeness as a design principle: repetition, colour key and variety, with seven dated museum works from Giotto to El Anatsui.
Unity in art is the sense that separate marks, colours and objects belong to one work. This vocabulary guide treats harmony as a close cousin, variety as the needed counterpart, and Gestalt grouping as a looking tool, then reads seven catalogue objects and names the mix-ups that flatten student essays into ‘it all matches’.
Contrast is organised difference: value, colour, texture and size, with six museum works and a way to read it on the wall.
Contrast names the planned gap between unlike parts of a work. This guide keeps that gap distinct from tonal value, from colour theory, and from chiaroscuro as a lighting method. It maps value, colour, texture and size, and reads six museum works from the Narmer Palette through to Kerry James Marshall.
A gallery vocabulary of contour, gesture and implied line, read through named museum works rather than classroom drawing exercises.
Students meet line as a moving dot. In a gallery it is contour, gesture, implied path and packed hatching. This guide tests those jobs on six named works, from Lascaux’s aurochs to Matisse’s cut Icarus, keeps drawing-class drills off the page, and shows how to name a path when you stand in front of the object.
Positive and negative space, overlapping and atmospheric depth as looking tools, from tomb painting to installation
Space in art is the area around, between and within forms, and the sense of depth a flat surface can imply. This vocabulary guide shows how overlapping, scale and aerial haze organise looking, with named works from Nebamun to Matisse and Whiteread, and how to tell space from composition, form and landscape genre.
Surface quality as an element of art: actual and implied texture, how painters and sculptors build it, and how to name it in front of a work.
Texture in art is the surface quality of a work: how it would feel in the hand, or how paint, line, and light make it look as if it would. This guide separates actual from implied texture, reads six named works, and shows how to describe texture without mixing it up with form, value, or a thick-paint recipe.
Three-dimensional volume in sculpture and the illusion of volume on a flat surface: how artists build, imply, and read form.
Form, as an element of art, is volume: length, width, and depth, whether carved in stone or suggested on canvas by light and shade. This guide sets the Getty and Tate senses of the word, works six named objects from a Met kouros to Whiteread’s House, and maps the mix-ups with shape, space, and “art forms.”
Tonal value is the light-to-dark scale in a picture: how it works, six museum examples, and how to read it by squinting.
In studio language, value is how light or dark a patch of colour is, independent of hue. This guide sets out the value scale, grisaille and tenebrism, Ad Reinhardt’s blacks, photographic greyscale, the squint test, and the mix-up with saturation. Price uses the same English word and is out of scope.
Visual weight, three classroom types and six named museum works: how artists keep a picture from tipping without mirroring every side.
Balance in art is the distribution of visual weight so a picture, print or object holds together under the eye. This vocabulary guide separates symmetry, asymmetry and radial design from composition as a whole, then reads six dated works from Chartres to Mondrian and names the looking mistakes that still wreck classroom essays.
Line, shape, form, space, value, colour and texture as the classroom seven, mapped with museum pictures and looking notes
An element of art is one isolable visual part of a picture or object: line, shape, form, space, value, colour or texture. This hub maps the seven used in studio teaching, shows how they behave in named works from Uccello to Matisse, and keeps principles of design, colour theory and linear perspective in their own places.
Istoria at the academy’s summit: Bible, myth and recent events as large pictures meant to instruct through human action.
History painting is the academic genre of serious narrative: Bible, myth, literature and public events staged as moral action, not a documentary of dates. This guide defines istoria, maps Félibien’s hierarchy, walks through studio method, reads six named canvases from Raphael to Géricault, and shows how later painters still use the form.
Breakfast tables, flower pieces, and kitchen pictures: how still life painting works from Haarlem specialists to Cézanne and Cubism.
Still life painting treats arranged objects as the subject, from Dutch ontbijtjes and floral bouquets to Chardin’s kitchens and Cézanne’s apples. This guide maps types, technique, six named works, contemporary practice, and how to tell the genre from vanitas, genre scenes, and decorative flower studies.
How conservators keep video, film, software and installation playback working as tapes fail and display equipment goes out of production
Tate, MoMA, the Guggenheim and the Met keep video, film and software playable: they document artist intent, migrate analogue signals and decide which decks stay dedicated to the work. This guide covers formats, ingest, Variable Media strategies, how the specialism formed, and current costs for museums.
Late-nineteenth-century painters who favoured dream, myth and suggestion over optical Realism and Impressionist light.
A period survey of the Symbolist art movement: why painters turned from nature toward idea and mood, who led the French and Belgian circles, how the style spread across Europe after 1886, and how four key works still teach the difference between Symbolism as a movement and a general “symbols in art” glossary.
After Impressionism’s light: structure, symbol and personal colour in Cézanne, Seurat, Gauguin, Van Gogh and their peers.
Post-Impressionism is a cluster, not a single school. This guide shows how painters kept modern subjects and a bright palette while pushing toward structure, symbol and expression — how the term arose, where it differs from Impressionism, and what those experiments fed into twentieth-century painting.
The letter set loose, the line woven, the arabesque the West once threw away — and the women who built modern abstraction out of all three, then got written out of it.
Abstraction is usually told as a Western invention that arrived elsewhere late. Saloua Raouda Choucair, Etel Adnan, Madiha Umar and a room of others tell it differently — often as the only woman in the movement, building modern form from the geometry, craft and calligraphy their own culture already held.
From asylum landscapes to floral still lifes, the Dutch master's most valuable works reveal a shifting global market
Van Gogh's rare auction appearances command astronomical sums, with his top ten works all exceeding $50m and revealing a dramatic shift in collecting power from West to East.
PinchukArtCentre announces extended application period for eighth edition of international contemporary art award
The biannual global art prize for artists under 35 has pushed its deadline to July 19, 2026, providing additional time for emerging practitioners worldwide to submit proposals.
A field guide to collecting Arab and Middle Eastern art — who buys, what it costs, why prices lag cultural significance, and where collectors are looking now.
How the Arab world went from selling its art history to the West to building the fastest-growing market for Middle Eastern art on earth — who buys, why, what it costs, and where the smart money is looking now
