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Ocula The art world in focus.

Ocula is a compelling destination and resource for collectors, curators, advisors and followers of contemporary art everywhere, offering a fresh perspective from Ocula Magazine on the artists and ideas shaping art now, along with the international reach and expertise of Ocula Private Sales and Advisory.

There’s a sense of something portentous in Firenze Lai’s large paintings, currently on display at White Cube Mason’s Yar...
25/10/2026

There’s a sense of something portentous in Firenze Lai’s large paintings, currently on display at White Cube Mason’s Yard in central London. The distant landscapes and massed, moody skies lend their foreground figures a sense of inscrutable significance. They appear like classical sculptures, pale as plaster and, more often than not n**e, their faces blurred or featureless, an expression of Lai’s interest in states that are more, in her words, “collective and ambiguous” than directly representative. ⁠
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Yet the figures are deeply expressive in their posture, body language and gestural modes. The shape of the body depends on where its attention is directed. ⁠
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As her first solo exhibition in the UK takes place, the London‑based artist talks to Nell Whittaker about how tech impacts the body, getting lost and why the figures in her paintings have big feet. Read their conversation in full on Ocula: https://ocula.com/magazine/conversations/firenze-lai-white-cube-london-october-2026/

Conceptual art duo Brognon Rollin has won this year’s Marcel Duchamp Prize. The €35,000 award, now in its 26th year, sho...
25/10/2026

Conceptual art duo Brognon Rollin has won this year’s Marcel Duchamp Prize. The €35,000 award, now in its 26th year, shortlists four French contemporary artists who “represent the diversity and vitality of the French art scene”, before a 10-strong international jury picks the winner.

David Brognon and Stéphanie Rollin, who have been collaborating for 20 years and who work between Paris and Luxembourg, were selected from a final four that also included multidisciplinary artist Joël Andrianomearisoa, writer, director and photographer Laura Henno, and photomontage specialist and sculptor Josèfa Ntjam.

Fabrice Hergott, director of the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris and a member of this year’s jury, described Brognon Rollin as having contributed a “demanding body of work that gives tangible form to what usually escapes our gaze: the passage of time spent waiting, addiction and inner resilience”.

Read this news story in full on Ocula: https://ocula.com/magazine/art-news/brognon-rollin-wins-marcel-duchamp-prize/

24/10/2026

Barbara Kruger’s ‘The History of Tears’ is one of two new Paris shows that are primarily about text. Her show at the Bourse de Commerce brings her signature black, white and red to the French museum. Over the Seine at Musée d’Orsay, Jenny Holzer has filled the space with texts from its archive, offering subtle commentary on the 19th-century collection and the violent world in which it was created. Both artists make their art from words—but each has something rather different to say.

In a new feature for Ocula, Madeleine Schwartz asks what their work can tell us when viewed in the context of the messy reality of demonstration?

Read this ‘Protest Art in a Time of Protest: On Barbara Kruger and Jenny Holzer in Paris’ on Ocula: https://ocula.com/magazine/opinion/barbara-kruger-jenny-holzer-paris-protest-2026/

Ahead of yesterday’s announcement, speculation that Art Basel Paris would close early was already growing—helped along o...
23/10/2026

Ahead of yesterday’s announcement, speculation that Art Basel Paris would close early was already growing—helped along on Wednesday by an Instagram post from Alicja Kwade, in which she wrote that her installation outside the fair would be dismantled earlier than planned. The artist attributed the decision to “people who simply want to resort to violence”.⁠
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Art Basel Paris’ organisers confirmed yesterday afternoon that the fair will close from 7pm this evening, two days ahead of schedule, and ahead of the protests that are expected to return to the streets of Paris this weekend. The works lining Avenue Winston Churchill, directly outside the Grand Palais, will also be removed today, including Kwade’s stone sphere sculpture, 'L’Élévation des Mondes' (2026).⁠
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Speaking to Ocula, the artist confirmed that the decision to dismantle her work was a joint one, made in consultation with fair organisers—but said that, personally, she would have liked it to remain in place. “I am not particularly concerned about the sculpture itself. Public art is made for people,” Kwade said.⁠
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“It is meant to be accessible, to become part of everyday life, to invite encounters, interaction and dialogue. I believe that art in public space should belong to the people who share that space, rather than being something distant or untouchable.⁠
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Read this news story in full on Ocula: https://ocula.com/magazine/art-news/alicja-kwade-protests-art-basel-paris/

Claude Monet’s 'Iris' (c 1924–1925) sold for €50 million at Sotheby’s Paris yesterday evening, becoming the most expensi...
23/10/2026

Claude Monet’s 'Iris' (c 1924–1925) sold for €50 million at Sotheby’s Paris yesterday evening, becoming the most expensive artwork ever auctioned in France.⁠
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The work, which had been expected to fetch between €22 million–€30 million (all prices include fees), was sold to a private collector in Asia. ⁠
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The price was almost four times the artist’s French auction record, previously set only hours earlier when Christie’s sold 'Bord des falaises à Pourville' (1882) for €12.8 million.⁠
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'Iris' was part of the Jeanne Schlumberger collection, offered at Sotheby’s. Schlumberger met Parisian dealer Katia Granoff in the 1950s; Granoff helped to renew interest in Monet’s late paintings and guided many of Schlumberger’s purchases which, according to Sotheby’s, she kept in her townhouse on Rue Las Cases and did not lend to exhibitions.⁠
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Read this news story in full on Ocula: https://ocula.com/magazine/art-news/50m-monet-most-expensive-ever-auctioned-france/

Chanel has become a lead partner of Hong Kong’s M+ museum, extending the Parisian luxury fashion brand’s collaboration w...
23/10/2026

Chanel has become a lead partner of Hong Kong’s M+ museum, extending the Parisian luxury fashion brand’s collaboration with the museum for three years and broadening the partnership to include exhibitions, public programmes and projects drawing on the museum’s collection.

The extension introduces Pioneering Visions, a series focused mainly on artists from Hong Kong, Greater China and elsewhere in Asia, as well as practices connected to the region. It will include gallery presentations, talks, screenings and workshops, alongside a new digital hub on artists and works in the M+ Collections.

Discussing the new series, Suhanya Raffel, Museum Director of M+, told Ocula: “Pioneering Visions goes beyond celebrating individual artists and makers, it reflects M+’s ongoing commitment to uncovering, contextualising and foregrounding artistic practices that embody the multidisciplinary nature of contemporary visual culture.

Read this news story in full on Ocula: https://ocula.com/magazine/art-news/chanel-m-museum-hong-kong-partnership-asia/

"The novelist Colm Tóibín once told a class that “you have to be a terrible monster to write. Someone might have told yo...
23/10/2026

"The novelist Colm Tóibín once told a class that “you have to be a terrible monster to write. Someone might have told you something that they shouldn’t have told you, and you have to be prepared to use it […] If you can’t do it, then writing isn’t for you.” I sometimes quote this line to my own creative writing students, mostly to stop them from writing about vampires. But I leave out the monster bit. I don’t know if it’s true, or helpful for them to hear. When Julian Barnes was working on his first novel, he said to himself: “Write it as if all your family were dead.” That does sound monstrous, but it also risks taking some of the heat out of the relationship, on both sides: some of the guilt on the writer’s side, which gives the writing its flavour, and some of the force of the family’s point of view. The novel itself can be part of an ongoing argument within a family that’s still live."⁠
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For Ocula, novelist Ben Markovits explores the tensions between writing and personal relationships by looking at a trio of recent films: 'Fatherland' by Pawel Pawlikowski, 'Bitter Christmas' by Pedro Almodóvar, and 'Sentimental Value' by Joachim Trier: https://ocula.com/magazine/opinion/fatherland-almodovar-joachim-trier-family-writing/

Art Basel Paris will shutter tomorrow evening, two days ahead of schedule, in advance of what is expected to be another ...
22/10/2026

Art Basel Paris will shutter tomorrow evening, two days ahead of schedule, in advance of what is expected to be another weekend of unrest across Paris.⁠
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Organisers announced their decision earlier today in an email to exhibitors, citing their desire to “safeguard our visitors, exhibitors, partners, staff and artworks”.⁠
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The email, sent by Art Basel’s chief artistic officer Vincenzo de Bellis and Karim Crippa, the Paris fair’s director, said: “We recognise the considerable impact of this decision on our galleries and are focused on supporting you through the early closure and the safe removal of artworks from the Grand Palais.⁠
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“We strongly encourage galleries to keep their presentation intact through the fair’s close tomorrow at 7pm and ask that general move-out not begin until access and removal instructions have been issued.”⁠
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The announcement, which was confirmed by organisers in an Instagram post in the last hour, follows a day of mounting rumours regarding a possible early closure of the fair, amid a week of increased security for fairgoers.

Read this news story in full on Ocula: https://ocula.com/magazine/art-news/art-basel-paris-to-shutter-early-protests/

There was no formal reception at the Élysée Palace to fête the beginning of Art Basel Paris this year. President Macron’...
22/10/2026

There was no formal reception at the Élysée Palace to fête the beginning of Art Basel Paris this year. President Macron’s cabinet was in a crisis meeting after a weekend of civil unrest, the quelling of which took priority over his usual cultural diplomacy.

Still, the situation didn’t dent collector enthusiasm for the art fair, as VIPs were seen lining up more than an hour before the opening of Avant Première, the fair’s pre-preview day on Tuesday, and sales reports soon began to roll in. Reported sales from opening day were not as exuberant as in 2025, when a couple of galleries touted $20 million-plus sales but, all things considered, it could have been far worse.

Expensive material was exchanged on both primary and secondary markets. White Cube was the earliest to report numbers, with highlights including two Julie Mehretu paintings for $7.85 million each. Hauser & Wirth closed on a historic Gerhard Richter photo painting, 'Rokokotisch (Rococo Table)', and a Georg Baselitz “hero” painting, 'Der Hirte (The shepherd)', both from 1965, for around $10 million each.

Read this news story in full on Ocula: https://ocula.com/magazine/art-news/v-vip-art-basel-paris-big-sales-more-radical/

During the early modern period, Japan was riven by conflicts between regional warlords, until a ruthless samurai took ce...
21/10/2026

During the early modern period, Japan was riven by conflicts between regional warlords, until a ruthless samurai took central control around 1603. It was one of his successors who closed the country and banned most external trade, ushering in an unprecedented period of peace and an explosion in the domestic economy. Over the next 250 years, Japan’s towns and cities flourished. The resulting hedonistic, pleasure-oriented, art-saturated urban world was given a nickname, The Floating World ('Ukiyo'​ 浮世)—an ironic echo of the Buddhist term of the same name, which means “sorrowful”, or “ephemeral” world. The period spawned its own artistic genre, ​'ukiyo-e', woodblocks and paintings that depicted its courtesans, musicians and other salacious characters. It was floating because all delight is ephemeral; it’s also because it was out of ordinary reach. ⁠
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In his first novel, art critic and editor Ben Eastham has taken up art’s relationship with power, hedonism and capital. In 'The Floating World', published by Fitzcarraldo, the idea of the 'Ukiyo' is literalised as a luxurious gated community, called the Floating World, constructed on an unnamed Aegean island, underneath a giant dome.⁠
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Read Ocula associate editor Nell Whittaker's opinion piece in full now: https://ocula.com/magazine/opinion/ben-eastham-the-floating-world-fitzcarraldo-2026/

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