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Pillars of Hong Kong’s art scene, a mother and son team reveal the fine art of collecting and their ‘Warren Buffett’-style role. 

Ben Brown Fine Arts is thrilled to announce that Nabil Nahas has been selected to represent Lebanon at the 61st edition of La Biennale di Venezia, running from 9 May to 22 November 2026.

Commissioned and curated by Nada Ghandour and produced in collaboration with the Lebanese Visual Art Association (LVAA), this marks a significant milestone in Nahas’s distinguished career. A defining figure in Lebanese contemporary art, his practice unites abstraction and figuration in luminous works that echo the rhythms of nature and the vastness of the cosmos.

Born in Beirut in 1949, Nahas makes paintings that seem to breathe, bloom and multiply, their surfaces dense with coral-like textures and saturated colour. Drawn to the intricate geometries of the natural world – fractal forms, tidal rhythms, marine organisms – he builds sculptural compositions that hover between abstraction and life. Palm trees, cedars, and starfish recur like memories, rooted in the landscapes of his childhood in Beirut and Cairo. What emerges is a practice attuned to pattern and persistence, a visual language shaped by place, time, and a quiet, unrelenting awe.

Nahas earned a BFA from the Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, in 1971 and an MFA from Yale University in 1973. In 2013, Nahas was awarded the National Order of the Cedar for services to Lebanese culture, an honour rarely bestowed to visual artists. Nahas has showcased his work extensively on an international scale for the past three decades, his first major museum retrospective held at the Beirut Exhibition Center, Beirut, in 2010. His work is held in numerous public collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Tate Modern, London; Mathaf, Doha; and the British Museum, London.

The Lebanese Pavilion will be located in the Arsenale, at the heart of the Biennale’s historic grounds.

We extend our warmest congratulations to Nabil on this well-deserved honour.

A Rose Is, on view at The FLAG Art Foundation through 21 June 2025, is a group exhibition exploring the rose’s enduring – and often contradictory – symbolism in art history and visual culture. Revered for its beauty yet steeped in connotations of desire, danger, and decay, the rose has served as muse and metaphor for centuries. This exhibition gathers a diverse range of contemporary artists to examine the rose as a shifting emblem – of seduction and sentimentality, of resistance and ritual.

Among the works on view is New Freezer – Rich the Kid ft. Kendrick Lamar (2017) by Awol Erizku. Adapted from the stylised signage found in Los Angeles nail salons, the painting dissects a familiar vernacular image – the manicured hand offering or receiving a rose – and reimagines it through the lens of race, visibility, and authorship. “What drew me to the ubiquitous nail salon sign at first was the fact that I never had seen a version with a black hand, and second, that it’s weird that this motif doesn’t communicate whether the hand is receiving the rose or giving it... The moment the hand is black, considering the racial tension and political climate of our country, it took on a whole new life and meaning, which was very exciting to me as the basis for a new body of work,” explained Erizku.
By isolating and recontextualising this graphic gesture, Erizku disrupts the Warholian language of pop iconography. The substitution of a Black hand within a typically generic commercial image recalibrates its meaning entirely. In Erizku’s hands, the motif becomes charged – quietly political, insistently present. It speaks to absence as much as presence, interrogating what is seen, what is assumed, and what is deliberately excluded.

We are pleased to announce that Gavin Turk's Pile is now on display at Museum Voorlinden as part of The Life of Things exhibition, running until 2 November 2025. Pile is a sculpture of black rubbish bags that explores rubbish as a narrative device - telling stories of use, production, and disposal, which in turn reveal insights into who we are and how we live.

Miquel Barceló’s Autofiction, on view at Fondation Jan Michalski, Montricher, from 29 of March - 28 September, 2025, explores the book not just as an object but as a metaphor for knowledge, transformation, and life itself. Spanning works from 1970 to 2020, the exhibition traces his ongoing engagement with books - merged with bodies, nature, and space - as visual and tactile subjects. Through paintings, sculptures, drawings, and notebooks, Barceló reveals how reading, writing, and making are deeply entwined in his artistic practice.

Ena Swansea's backlit waves of Los Angeles is included in 'HOW'S MY PAINTING?', a new exhibition now open at Deichtorhallen, Hamburg, presenting 200 works by over 70 artists from the Falckenberg Collection. ⁠
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Known for her atmospheric, layered works, Swansea’s approach aligns with the exhibition’s exploration of painting in its many forms. Her work in the show sits alongside that of influential figures such as Nicole Eisenman, Mike Kelley, Raymond Pettibon, Michel Majerus, Joyce Pensato, Philip Guston, John Baldessari and Ouattara Watts. The exhibition acknowledges her distinctive contribution to the medium and reinforces Harald Falckenberg’s legacy of recognizing visionary artists early in their careers.⁠

We are delighted to announce that José Parlá ’s La Habana Sunset (2022), from his series Ciclos: Blooms of Mold, has entered the esteemed Brooklyn Museum’s permanent collection as a gift in celebration of the institution’s 200th anniversary.

Currently on view in Brooklyn Abstractions: Four Artists, Four Walls, La Habana Sunset is presented alongside works by Maya Hayuk, Kennedy Yanko, and the late Leon Polk Smith. These four artists, each with profound connections to Brooklyn, reimagine the iconic Beaux-Arts Court through their distinct and visually immersive installations.

Duality (Reflection) (2022) by Hank Willis Thomas is currently on view at the Vancouver Art Gallery’s Offsite: Hank Willis Thomas, which has recently been extended until June 2025.

We are proud to have loaned this striking stainless-steel sculpture, which isolates a single charged gesture—an extended arm forming a sign that shifts between victory, peace, and derision. Part of Thomas’s Punctum series, inspired by Roland Barthes, Duality (Reflection) explores the fluidity of meaning through recontextualized imagery.

Presented alongside other works from the series, it invites viewers to reconsider how visual narratives shape perceptions.