The intimate surroundings of the Trianon will be the setting for the Palace of Versailles’ 12th exhibition of modern art. Versailles – Visible/Invisible leads us as if through the antique darkroom of five photographers: Dove Allouche, Nan Goldin, Martin Parr, Eric Poitevin and Viviane Sassen, who will unveil works they have created specially to resonate with the chosen setting. This exhibition showcases their original and often surprising perspectives on not only the palace’s most well-known spaces, but also its hidden gems.The works will reveal a new Versailles, between design and heritage. Photographer, printmaker and designer Dove Allouche, who was born in Paris in 1972, likes to reveal that which is simultaneously obvious and invisible. Like the concept of ‘magic eye’ images, he endeavours to depict things that are too close to the eye to be seen, that are right there in front of us but through w

With a new record expected for a work by Lee Krasner and another one possible for a Helen Frankenthaler, the appetite for female abstract painters, and women artists in general, is growing fast as New York gears up for its spring auctions beginning on Monday. “We’ve seen an extraordinary recalibration in the market for female artists, both historical and contemporary,” said David Galperin, head of evening sales at Sotheby’s auction house. Last year was already an auspicious one, with record-breaking auctions for the late Frankenthaler, as well as for 50-year-old Briton Cecily Brown, Grace Hartigan, who died in 2008, and above all Joan Mitchell, who died in 1992 and whose “Blueberry” went in May 2018 for $16.6 million. David Leiber, a partner at the David Zwirner gallery, which has exhibited a number of Mitchell’s works, recalled that although she found popular and critical acclaim very early on, only recently did her work profit from the increasing interest in women artists. “These

In the era of “fake news” and social media echo chambers, Venice’s Biennale art fair is challenging preconceived biases by suggesting other ways of contextualising modern society’s biggest issues. “What elevates art into something special is the fact that it resists closed mentalities,” the international exposition’s artistic director, American Ralph Rugoff, told AFP ahead of Saturday’s opening. The theme of the world’s most prestigious art gathering is “May You Live in Interesting Times”, an (apocryphal) ancient Chinese curse that Rugoff says uncannily captures the world today, as the news cycle spins from crisis to crisis. “At a moment when the digital dissemination of fake news and ‘alternative facts’ is corroding political discourse and trust… it is worth pausing whenever possible to reassess our terms of reference,” he said in his introduction to the 58th Biennale. For the 2019 edition, which runs until November 24, Rugoff, director of the Hayward Gallery in London, has invited