Russia is presenting work at this year’s Venice Biennale for the first time in six years, Art News reports. In February 2022 the Russian artists Kirill Savchenkov and Alexandra Sukhareva and Lithuanian curator Raimundas Malašauskas cancelled their exhibition in protest at Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In 2024 Russia gave its pavilion over to Bolivia. Speaking to Art News, Mikhail Shvydkoy – Russia’s delegate for international cultural exchanges and former culture minister – said that Russia ‘never left the Venice Biennale’, adding that the ‘very presence of our pavilion – regardless of what takes place there […] – means the presence of our country in Venice’s cultural space’. Titled ‘The Tree is Rooted in the Sky’, Russia’s exhibition this year will involve more than 50 artists from Russia and elsewhere.
There are reports that the Golestan Palace in Tehran, the city’s only UNESCO World Heritage-listed site, has been damaged by shockwaves from a US-Israeli air strike. Dating to the 16th century, the palace is one of the oldest buildings in Tehran and is known for its Qajar-era architecture, having been redesigned in 1865 by Haji Abol-hasan Mimar Navai. It has been both the seat of government and the royal residence. In a statement, UNESCO expressed concern over the risks to cultural heritage as the US-Israeli war against Iran escalates, confirming that the coordinates of listed sites in the region – which are protected under international law – have been communicated to ‘all parties concerned’. UNESCO heritage-listed buildings in Tel Aviv have also been damaged in the conflict, the Art Newspaper reports, including two Bauhaus buildings in the White City.
The Rijksmuseum has a new Rembrandt. Vision of Zacharias in the Temple (1633), painted when Rembrandt was 27 years old, was deattributed in 1960 and sold to a private collector in 1961. In 2024 its current owners presented it to the Rijksmuseum for assessment, and a two-year examination by experts confirmed that it was painted by the Dutch master. The work will be on long-term loan to the museum. The director of the Rijksmuseum, Taco Dibbits, said that it is ‘wonderful that people can now learn more about the young Rembrandt’.
Liliana Angulo Cortés, the director of the Museo Nacional de Colombia in Bogotá, died last month at the age of 51, the Art Newspaper reports. Born in Bogota in 1974, Angulo studied at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia before completing a master’s at the University of Illinois Chicago as a Fulbright scholar. Angulo joined the Museo Nacional de Colombia as curator in 2023 and was appointed director the following year. Her tenure was marked by the museum’s increased focus on Afro-Colombian and Indigenous communities, with initiatives such as the Laboratory for Reparations and Anti-Racism exploring how museum collections affect national identity. In a statement to the Art Newspaper, a spokesperson for Colombia’s ministry of culture described Angulo’s death as ‘a significant loss for the Colombian cultural sector’.
Emerson Bowyer is the new chief curator of the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, the museum announced on 5 March. An expert in 18th- and 19th-century British and French art, he joins the Kimbell from the Art Institute of Chicago. Raised in Sydney, Bowyer moved to the United States to study art history at Columbia, later taking on roles at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and the Frick Collection. In other appointments, Nicholas Bell is the new director of the Royal Ontario Museum, the institution announced last week. Since 2019, Bell has been the president and CEO of Glenbow, an art and history museum in Calgary. Before that, he held curatorial positions at the Mystic Seaport Museum in Connecticut and the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C. He assumes the role at the Royal Ontario Museum, the most visited museum in Canada, on 6 July, replacing Josh Basseches, who stepped down at the end of 2025 after nearly a decade leading the museum.
