War-Torn Heritage, Red-Hot Markets, Mega Portraits

A South Asian Modern art collection tied to a tea company roared at Christie’s in London. Six minutes into Christie’s first South Asian art auction in London since 2019, held on 11 June, a 1922 portrait of Mahatma Gandhi by Abanindranath Tagore hammered at £eight hundred twenty thousand—£1m with fees—more than 15 times its £fifty thousand high estimate and roughly doubling Tagore’s previous record of £four hundred nine thousand from 2013 at Christie’s New York. The 93-lot single-owner sale was a white-glove auction totaling £18.9m with fees, far beyond its £2.9m to £4.3m estimate, setting records for artists including KK Hebbar and Biren De.

Staying in London, Anish Kapoor is using his retrospective at the Hayward Gallery to press a point about scale and meaning. He opens the show with All of Nothing (2026), a massive inflatable that nearly fills the first gallery and forces a bodily encounter—you can’t see it all at once, and it pushes insistently against the architecture. Kapoor says the title matters because the work is simultaneously “a big huge thing” and “nothing,” “a stupid balloon” on one level. He also talks about contradictions in his practice—material and immaterial—and cites Barnett Newman: scale isn’t size, it’s meaning. Kapoor puts it bluntly: “just because a thing is big, it doesn’t mean it’s of any interest or even good.”

In the United Kingdom art conversation, the field is mourning David Hockney, who died at home on 11 June, aged 88. Tributes gathered by the BBC include Tracey Emin, who called him a “great artist and a wonderful man” and “a proud chain-smoking homosexual who flew the flag higher than any other British artist.” Edmund de Waal highlighted Hockney’s 1976 series of 20 mixed-intaglio colour etchings riffing on Picasso’s The Old Guitarist and Wallace Stevens’ poem The Man with the Blue Guitar. Museums weighed in too: the V&A noted his range from photo collages to iPad paintings, and Nicholas Serota cited nearly a million visitors to his Paris exhibition last year at the Fondation Louis Vuitton.

Across the Atlantic, the Met has an intentionally breezy project: “Giacometti in the Temple of Dendur,” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art through September 8. The show places a cluster of Alberto Giacometti’s female figures—mostly loans from the Fondation Giacometti—around the museum’s signature Roman-era Egyptian temple. A headless black sculpture from 1932 sits inside the temple itself, and there’s even a spindly Giacometti cat perched on a stepped wall like an odd little surprise. The wall text justifies the juxtaposition by pointing to Giacometti’s inspiration from Egyptian art, but the overall mood is casual—almost a statement that “you can just do things”—while the Met’s forthcoming Tang Wing is under construction.

Also in the United States, the Obama Foundation revealed the first official portrait of Barack and Michelle Obama together on Monday, June 15. The painting, by Nigerian-born, Los Angeles-based artist Njideka Akunyili Crosby, is titled The Obamas: Springing Forth (2026) and uses her signature photo-transfer technique. It will be installed in the lobby of the eight hundred fifty dollars million Barack Obama Presidential Center, nicknamed the “Obamalisk,” alongside other new commissions, including by Idris Khan and María Magdalena Campos-Pons. Akunyili Crosby based the portrait on a photograph she took of the couple, depicting Michelle seated cross-legged in front of Barack, who sits on a desk angled toward her, with layered references to their lives and history.

Back to Europe with urgent cultural-heritage news: a Russian strike damaged cultural sites in Ukraine, including Kyiv Pechersk Lavra and the Kharkiv Art Museum. Russia launched 70 missiles and 611 drones across Dnipro, Kharkiv, and Kyiv; Ukraine intercepted 50 missiles and 582 drones, but at least 11 people died and 50 were injured. A missile hit the 121-year-old Kharkiv Art Museum—designed by architect Oleksiy Beketov—injuring five people, including a 1-year-old child and a 62-year-old woman. The roof and attic are reportedly gone, though the most valuable works had long been evacuated. At Kyiv Pechersk Lavra, a Geran-2 drone struck the altar part of the Assumption Cathedral, burning over eight thousand six hundred square feet of roof.

The Art Newspaper reports similar damage from massive Russian missile and drone strikes over the weekend and into Monday, including hits to multiple cultural sites. Kyiv Pechersk Lavra—a Unesco World Heritage site—was struck, and the adjacent Mystetskyi Arsenal, an 18th-century complex now serving as a contemporary art centre, was also hit. Metropolitan Epiphanius, head of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine, said the roof of the Dormition Cathedral was on fire overnight and later said it would be restored. Unesco cited possible “significant damage” to the cathedral and impact on nearby historic structures, including the fortification complex and Ivan Kushnik Tower. Zelensky wrote that two Russian drones deliberately targeted the area and reported 35 injured in Kyiv, 53 wounded nationwide, and 11 killed.

Shifting to West Africa and continental Europe, Ibrahim Mahama is unveiling a new public commission on the Münsterplatz after a year marked by major recognition and personal injury. Winner of the inaugural Art Basel Gold Awards in the established artists category, he presents The God of Small Things—referencing Arundhati Roy’s novel—built from large patchworked textiles incorporating batakari robes, rubber tyres, and long-haul transport canvases. Mahama also received the 2026 Arnold Bode Prize in Kassel, after placing first in the 2025 ArtReview Power 100. He discussed recovering from a March assault allegedly by Ghanaian police that broke three teeth and halted travel. In his practice, he insists: “All these things are the stains; they are part of the story.”

Staying in Switzerland, Kunsthalle Basel is hosting Shuang Li’s first institutional solo show in Europe, titled Alliance, running until 12 September. Li—born in 1990 in China and now based in both Berlin and Geneva—turns her attention to storm-chasing videos, after first encountering live-streamed TikToks of people driving into tornadoes. She describes being struck by the “romanticism… ultimately chasing nothing but wind,” and draws parallels between flat landscapes where tornadoes form and what she calls today’s “flattened media landscape.” Kunsthalle Basel director and chief curator Mohamed Almusibli says the work doesn’t keep viewers at a safe distance; it pulls them into speed and space until catastrophe feels internal, not distant.

Finally, a major market move: Leonardo Drew has joined Hauser & Wirth for worldwide representation. The gallery will debut a new work, Number 451, at Art Basel this week, and Drew’s first solo exhibition with Hauser & Wirth is scheduled for New York in fall 2027. Over four decades, Drew has become known for transforming weathered wood, metal, paper, and other materials into sprawling sculptures and installations about destruction, renewal, and time. His work is held by institutions including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Hirshhorn, and Tate. Hauser & Wirth president Marc Payot said Drew advances a path forged by Jack Whitten and, alongside Mark Bradford, reshapes abstraction into a tool for questioning the world.

That’s today’s download—links to every story are waiting in the show notes. Come back tomorrow for your next hit of art-world reality, and until then: Chinga la migra.

Today's Stories