Arts and Architecture's Arts Business Idea Competition winners announced - The Pennsylvania State University

a permanent home for anselm kiefer’s ‘black flakes’A monumental painting by German artist Anselm Kiefer has finally found a place large enough to exhibit it, nearly two decades after its creation. In Künzelsau, Germany, David Chipperfield Architects has completed a freestanding concrete pavilion built specifically to house Schwarze Flocken (Black Flakes), a work measuring more than eleven meters tall and seven meters wide. The museum building opened to the public on October 13th, 2026 in the sculpture garden of Museum Würth 2, and marked the painting’s first public presentation. Created in 2007, Schwarze Flocken is the largest work by Kiefer in the Würth Collection. Its immense canvas incorporates oil, emulsion, shellac, earth, and twigs, creating a heavily textured surface characteristic of the artist’s practice. The painting takes its name from a poem by Paul Celan, whose writing confronts the personal losses and devastation of the Holocaust. Kiefer’s work draws on this history through a bleak, layered composition, its physical material giving weight to the subject. The challenge of exhibiting something of this size became the starting point for an entirely new building.

MCH, the fair’s parent group, once faced insolvency and is now seeing a once-in-a-generation downturn.

Students from the independent École du Louvre and the National School of Fine Arts are leading the ongoing action. Students block the entrance to the Louvre Museum in protest of the lack of resources and access to culture. (photo Basile Dubouis / Hans Lucas / AFP via Getty Images)

“This history is dirty,” says the Brazilian artist, who sees the colonial past as an active force in her country’s present. Rosana Paulino at her exhibition ¿História Natural? at the Vera List Center for Art and Politics in New York City (photo Daniela Mayer/Hyperallergic)

Combining the elemental rhythms with human-made materials, DRIFT’s latest sculptural choreography invites visitors to consider their connection to nature in an interactive experience influenced by the planet’s intrinsic processes and systems. “Aeolus” is named for the ancient Greek deity of the wind and comprises an environment characterized by numerous glass rods with tiny lights inside. These are activated by visitors’ movements. “Like wind itself, the work only fully exists through interaction,” say Lonneke Gordijn and Ralph Nauta, founders of the Amsterdam-based design studio in a statement. “It is both still and in motion, fixed yet constantly changing.” Light and glass were chosen to further represent ephemerality and transitions. Glass can be so light and clear it appears spectral, and light is immaterial like the wind: it may be here one moment and gone the next.

In Mani Haghighi’s new film, an artist’s extensive archive draws the ire of the authorities. I Deserve a Lover Whose Every Rise Sets Fiery Dooms Raging Across the Skies (2026) poster (all images courtesy Film at Lincoln Center)Mani Haghighi’s documentary, I Deserve a Lover Whose Every Rise Sets Fiery Dooms Raging Across the Skies (2026), opens with a diverse group of stone-faced archivists in a beautiful, jewel-toned room lined with books and ephemera. They suit up in masks and gloves to root through garbage bags filled with photo albums, broken pottery, and other artifacts of unknown provenance, caked in dirt and debris. However, as the Iranian director’s voice-over narration explains, “This film wasn’t meant to begin this way.” Authorities confiscated the footage Haghighi shot for the original opening, “a girl standing on a foggy mountain road, searching for a phone signal,” when they raided the film crew’s hotel room in Tabriz. Their crime was depicting a woman without a headscarf. I Deserve a Lover Whose Every Rise Sets Fiery Dooms Raging Across the Skies is a document of documentation — of discovery, preservation, and remembrance.