François Pinault is turning the Palazzo Grassi in Venice into a permanent display space for his art collection. The French billionaire bought the 18th-century palace in 2005 and it hosted its first temporary exhibition a year later. Since then it has held solo shows by artists such as Damien Hirst, Luke Tuymans, Marlene Dumas and, currently, Michael Armitage. The temporary exhibitions will now end but will continue at the Punta della Dogana, Pinault’s other space in Venice. In March 2027, 100 as-yet-unidentified works from Pinault’s 10,000-strong collection will go on permanent display in the space.
Archaeologists in Egypt have discovered the remains of two monumental statues believed to represent Ramses II, reports Art News. After a local landowner reported finding an inscribed stone block in the village of Behbeit El- Hagar in central Egypt, a team from the Supreme Council of Antiquities visited the site. There, they uncovered a 1.6m-high stone head depicting a man wearing a double crown like those worn by ancient Egyptian rulers, and a part of that statue’s back pillar bearing Ramses II’s royal title, ‘Hor Ka Nakht Mery Maat’. Nearby, archaeologists also discovered a 2.5-metre-long section of another monumental sculpture believed to depict the pharaoh and a pink granite block inscribed with two more of his titles. Excavation is ongoing.
Getty Images has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy as part of a company restructure, Reuters reports. The image-licensing company plans to go private with a promised investment of more than $500m from Koch Industries. The announcement comes after Getty Images abandoned its $3.7bn merger with Shutterstock when the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority said that Shutterstock had to sell its editorial business for the deal to go through. In an earnings call in August, Getty CEO Craig Peters said that the company had spent more than $100m on the failed merger, and the New York Stock Exchange delisted the company because of its low share price in September. A Getty spokesperson told the publication that no layoffs will be made as part of the plan.
Artist and founder of Nature Morte gallery, Peter Nagy, has died at the age of 67. He set up Nature Morte with Alan Belcher in the East Village in 1982. The gallery closed in 1988 but was reopened by Nagy in New Delhi a decade later. Representing artists such as Mrinalini Mukherjee and Bharti Kher, it opened a second space in the city in 2014 and another in Mumbai in 2024. Nagy is credited with transforming the Indian contemporary art scene by introducing many of the gallery’s artists to the international market. His own work is held in the collections of museums such as Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.
The winner of this year’s RIBA Stirling Prize is a housing project in south London. Lion Green Road in Coulsdon, by Mary Duggan Architects with RUFF Architects in Coulsdon, comprises 157 homes across five blocks connected by green spaces. RIBA President Chris Williamson said that ‘at a time when we urgently need to deliver more homes, Lion Green Road shows that density can be achieved without compromising the quality of the places we create’. This is the second time a council housing project has won the UK’s most prestigious architecture prize after Mikhail Riches Architects and Cathy Hawley’s council-commissioned terrace houses in Norwich won in 2019.