Vancouver SketchFest is growing for laughs - The Georgia Straight

Irish artist Patrick Graham and Northern Irish artist Cathy Wilkes are the recipients of the inaugural Francis Bacon Awards for Irish Visual Arts program. Graham is being awarded the Francis Bacon Lifetime Achievement Award for his contribution to Irish painting and influence on contemporary visual art over more than six decades, while Wilkes is receiving the Francis Bacon Mid-Career Artist Award, nodding to her multihyphenated practice of sculpture, painting, drawing and installation. The €40,000 ($44,800) prize fund is being split, Graham will receive €25,000 and €15,000 for Wilkes.

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)