Venezuela Earthquake Leaves Painter Onai Quiñonez Missing as Major Art Headlines Unfold in Berlin, Paris, and Plymouth
The most urgent story in this week’s art news is not an exhibition opening or a market event, but a rescue effort. Painter Onai Quiñonez is believed to be trapped beneath the rubble of his collapsed apartment building in Caraballeda, in La Guaira, after Venezuela’s devastating double earthquake on June 24. His family has asked for help in making his situation visible, and his sister-in-law, Mariela Roa, said in a WhatsApp message that he had been under the debris for 41 hours. At the time she spoke, official rescue services had not yet reached the site.
Quiñonez’s wife, artist Laura Silva, had stepped outside the apartment to walk their dog when the first quake struck. According to the report, she saw the building collapse while her husband was still inside. The account places the human cost of the disaster at the center of a broader week of art-world news that, under ordinary circumstances, would have been dominated by openings, awards, and institutional milestones.
In Berlin, Gabriele Stötzer has opened a major solo exhibition at Gropius Bau, titled “Dabei Sein und nicht schweigen” (“Show up and don’t be quiet”). The presentation includes 150 works and is being described as the largest exhibition ever devoted to an East German woman in a German state museum. That scale matters: Stötzer’s career has long occupied a crucial but underrecognized place in postwar German art and feminist cultural history.
In Paris, workers were set to begin dismantling JR’s La Caverne du Pont-Neuf, a public artwork installed on a bridge associated with Christo and Jeanne-Claude. The work was damaged by a storm and a heat wave that caused its interior temperature to rise sharply. Elsewhere, The Box in Plymouth, England, won the UK Art Fund Museum of the Year Award, worth about $158,000.
The week also brought a New York Magazine feature on the Watermill Center, the artist residency founded by the late theater director Robert Wilson in Southampton, and on NOMAD’s US debut there from June 25 to 28. For NOMAD founder Nicolas Bellavance-Lecompte, the setting reflected a shared belief that art, design, architecture, performance, and daily life should not be separated. In a week marked by loss, recognition, and institutional attention, that idea feels especially resonant.
