Venice Biennale, Chicago Fraud Sentence, and a Renoir Return to Spain
The 2026 Venice Biennale will open next week with a central exhibition shaped by a curator who will not live to see it. Koyo Kouoh, the Cameroonian-Swiss curator who died in May from liver cancer, had already assembled the artist list and worked with advisers on “In Minor Keys,” the Biennale’s main exhibition, before her death. Rather than cancel the project, Biennale president Pietrangelo Buttafuoco asked Kouoh’s husband, Philippe Mall, and her son, Djibril Schmed, to help carry it forward. The exhibition is now set to open to the public on May 9.
Schmed said the decision reflected Kouoh’s own determination to finish the work. According to the account, she was still shaping the project in her final days, and the team around her chose to complete what she had begun. The result is a Biennale central exhibition that arrives with unusual emotional weight: not only as a major international survey, but as a posthumous realization of a curator’s vision.
Elsewhere in the art world, a Chicago judge sentenced Robert Dunlap to 23 years in federal prison and ordered him to pay damages after his conviction in an art-backed cryptocurrency scam. Dunlap, a Texas native, ran the Meta-1 Coin Trust from 2018 to 2023 and claimed it was backed by billions in gold and as much as $1 billion in art, including works by Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dalí, and Vincent van Gogh. Nearly 1,000 people were defrauded, with losses totaling more than $20 million.
The roundup also includes a quieter but telling market and museum note: Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s 1884 painting “The Cherry Hat,” once owned by the Duchess of Alba, is returning to Spain after a Spanish buyer cited historical and cultural reasons for the purchase. In Paris, French authorities seized 12 percent more looted artifacts last year than the year before, and more recently intercepted a trove of ancient art from Iran bound for the UK.
Other developments point to the pressures and improvisations shaping the field now. The American Arts Conservancy, commissioner of the US Pavilion, has been seeking donations of at least $100 to help fund the exhibition. In Venice, the Belarus Free Theatre is preparing “Official. Unofficial. Belarus.” a collateral event that aims to present the voice of unofficial culture. And in Turin, a wheeled robot named R1 has become the new docent at Palazzo Madama. The season’s news suggests an art world moving between grief, restitution, fraud, and reinvention — often all at once.
