Venice Biennale to follow Koyo Kouoh’s vision

On Tuesday, the Venice Biennale announced that next year’s edition will follow the vision of its curator, Koyo Kouoh, who died of cancer last month, just days before she was set to share its theme. Titled ‘In Minor Keys’, the 61st International Art Exhibition will be curated by Kouoh’s team ‘just as she conceived and defined it, preserving […] the work she pursued with such dedication to the very end’, the Biennale stated. Full details of the Biennale, including the list of artists in the central exhibition and the list of participating countries, will be announced on 25 February 2026.

Archaeologists in northern Guatemala have discovered the remains of a Mayan city thought to be nearly 3,000 years old, reports the Guardian. In a statement on Thursday, the Guatemalan culture ministry revealed that the city, which dates from around 800–500 BC and includes a 33-metre-high pyramid and other ceremonial monuments, was ‘one of the most ancient and important ceremonial centres’ of the Mayan civilisation in Petén, a jungle region near the country’s border with Mexico. The city has been named Los Abuelos (‘the grandparents’), after anthropomorphic sculptures of an ‘ancestral couple’ found at the site.

Also this week, researchers discovered some 100 archaeological structures in the Peruvian Andes, reports the Art Newspaper. The structures were unearthed at the Gran Pajatén archaeological complex, which is around 500km north of Lima and home to a number of ruins left by the Chachapoya civilisation, which inhabited the north-eastern Andes of Peru from the 7th to the 16th centuries before falling to the Incas. ‘We now know that Gran Pajatén was not a remote ceremonial outpost but rather a central node in an articulated territorial system,’ said Juan Pablo de la Puente, the executive director of the World Monuments Fund in Peru.

The Centre Pompidou has signed an agreement with Brazil to open its first South American outpost, the Art Newspaper reports. Planned for November 2027, the new museum will be near Iguaçu falls, a UNESCO World Heritage site in the city of Foz do Iguaçu, which borders Argentina and Paraguay. The Centre Pompidou said the museum will ‘spotlight South American artistic creation and the unique cultural dynamics of the region’. Paraguayan architect Solano Benítez, who won the Golden Lion at the 2016 Venice Biennale, will design the 10,000-square-foot building. Construction costs are estimated at around $36m.

Artnet has announced that it is set to go private after investment firm Beowolff Capital acquired 65 per cent of the shares in its parent company, Artnet AG. Art News reports that Artnet’s board has approved the voluntary takeover, which values the company at around €65m. Beowolff Capital will offer to buy out the remaining shareholders in the coming months and delist the company from the Frankfurt Stock Exchange. Jan Petzel, the firm’s chief investment officer, said that Artnet ‘aligns perfectly with our goal of building an interconnected art market’. Recently, Beowollf became a majority shareholder in art sales platform Artsy: the Art Newspaper quotes the view of Artnet’s former largest shareholder, Rudolf Weng, that there is a plan is to combine the two companies.

The Louvre has agreed to return 258 objects from the collection of Adèle de Rothschild to the Fondation des Artistes, reports Le Monde. Rothschild bequeathed her mansion and all its contents to the French state before her death in 1922, but requested that her cabinet of curiosities remain intact. An inventory carried out by the Fondation des Artistes, the private museum established by de Rothschild, revealed that the Louvre had included the objects from the cabinet in several of its collections, including objets d’art and Islamic art. The Fondation is taking them back, but in exchange is giving to the Louvre 104 objects that were in the Louvre’s inventory but deposited with the Fondation.

James Rondeau will remain in his role as the director and president of the Art Institute of Chicago after a period of voluntary leave after an incident in which he allegedly took off his clothes in a state of intoxication on a flight on 18 April, the New York Times reports. He returns to work on 2 June.