In memoriam: remembering art world figures who died in 2025 – The Art Newspaper

As 2026 dawns, we pay tribute to the artists, curators, writers, sellers and different artwork world personalities who died in 2025. Beneath is a collection of our obituaries for the yr (click on on the individual’s title to learn the unique obituary).

January

Artist and activist Jaune Fast-to-see-Smith

Smith’s work typically took on, critiqued, ridiculed and subverted the imagery of mainstream Americana in addition to the US Fashionable artwork orthodoxy throughout work, sculptures, prints and extra. She made works paying homage to Andy Warhol that riffed on promoting iconography, intricate collages and transfers evocative of Robert Rauschenberg, and work based mostly on the flag and map of the US that interpollated Jasper Johns.

Artist and movie director David Lynch

Along with portray and shifting picture work, Lynch pursued printmaking, sculpture and images; in 2021-22, a survey of his photographs travelled to establishments in Switzerland and Denmark. In images, he informed Time Out his largest influences had been William Eggleston, Joel-Peter Witkin and Diane Arbus on the event of a 2014 exhibition at London’s Photographers’ Gallery. “The artwork life is a superb life,” Lynch informed Artforum in 2019. “It’s espresso and cigarettes, possibly some pink wine.”

February

Artist Mel Bochner

Bochner’s work attested to the originality, adaptability and mental rigour of artwork rooted in seriality, guidelines and data programs. His 1966 work 36 Images and 12 Diagrams consists of a grid of the titular 48 objects, depicting grids of numbers and photographs of picket cubes organized in corresponding configurations. One other early breakthrough was his Measurement Room (1969), which debuted at Heiner Friedrich Gallery in Münich.

April

Collector and patron Man Ullens

Baron Man Ullens de Schooten, the artwork collector and patron who cofounded Beijing’s Ullens Middle for Modern Artwork (UCCA) in 2007 along with his spouse Myriam Ullens, died on 19 April aged 90. Ullens turned an enthusiastic supporter of Chinese language up to date artwork in its heady adolescence within the Eighties and 90s. He would go on to build up a famend assortment of Chinese language artwork, encompassing round 1,500 works by artists resembling Huang Yong Ping, Qiu Zhijie and Cao Fei.

Could

Curator Koyo Kouoh

Koyo Kouoh, an enormous of the up to date artwork world who tirelessly championed African artists and have become the primary lady from the continent to curate the Venice Biennale, which opens subsequent Could, died in Could, aged 57. In Dakar, Senegal, she based Uncooked Materials Firm, an unbiased artwork centre. In 2016, she joined the Zeitz Museum of Modern Artwork Africa in Cape City, serving as curator and govt director.

Photographer Sebastião Salgado

Salgado can be remembered primarily for collection resembling Staff (1993), Exodus (2000) Genesis (2013) and Amazônia (2021). Every physique of labor captures individuals in extremis in dramatically panoramic settings. However he’s maybe greatest identified for Gold (2019), wherein he photographed greater than 50,000 miners teetering on roughly assembled ladders and churning via mud and stone within the huge pit of Serra Pelada within the Brazilian Amazon.

Broadcaster Alan Yentob

Yentob joined the BBC in 1968 as a trainee—the one non-Oxbridge graduate after graduating from Leeds with a regulation diploma—rising up the ranks to turn out to be editor of the established arts present Enviornment in 1978. Yentob was engaged on an Think about programme devoted to the artist Jenny Saville when he died; she informed The Artwork Newspaper: “The contribution Alan made to British tradition was immense. A variety of worldwide creativity turned accessible to all via these documentaries.”

June

Sculptor Joel Shapiro

Within the Nineteen Seventies, Shapiro turned identified for his diminutive cast-iron home sculptures—melancholic, floor-dwelling subversions of sculpture’s stuffy gravitas within the white dice. Finest identified for his vibrant, isomorphic statues constructed from picket beams, Shapiro straddled the road between abstraction and figuration in his artwork observe, creating humanoid monuments that really feel as if they may bounce, stride or topple at any second.

Writer Thomas Neurath

Though he might at first have had conflicted emotions about taking over accountability for Thames & Hudson whereas nonetheless a really younger man—following his father Walter’s early dying in 1967—he introduced a single-minded vitality and mental bravura to the duty of creating the agency’s lists, editorially, technically and commercially. His chief monument is the standard of the books printed by Thames & Hudson, however the truth that it stays a completely unbiased household agency is sort of as spectacular.

July

Artist Robert Wilson

Wilson was a prolific visible artist, creating drawings, sculptures and different objects to tell and accompany his stage productions; these had been the topic of an exhibition at SFMOMA (San Francisco Museum of Fashionable Artwork) in 1991. Within the 2010s he started creating his Video Portraits collection, which debuted with an exhibition on the Musée du Louvre in 2013. The work options portraits of Girl Gaga within the type of well-known work, together with Jacques-Louis David’s The Dying of Marat (1793) and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’s Mademoiselle Caroline Rivière (1793-1807).

August

Collector Doris Lockhart

Doris Lockhart, the US-born artwork collector credited with altering the UK up to date artwork scene within the Nineteen Seventies and Eighties along with her then husband Charles Saatchi, died aged 88 in August. Alongside along with her former husband Charles Saatchi, Lockhart introduced main postwar US artists to the fore and was additionally instrumental in recognising and boosting the infamous Younger British Artists of the Nineteen Nineties.

September

Philanthropist Agnes Gund

Gund, who died in September aged 87, was a number one determine within the artwork world who was extensively celebrated for her vital contributions to cultural establishments and her efforts to make use of artwork as vessel for social change, together with in training and legal justice reform. “Aggie’s impression on our museums is immeasurable,” Christophe Cherix, the director of the Museum of Fashionable Artwork in New York, mentioned in a press release forThe Artwork Newspaper. “She was a tireless champion of artists and a fierce believer within the energy of artwork to alter the world.”

October

Gallerist and critic Carla Stellweg

The founder and editor-in-chief of the bilingual artwork journal Artes Visuales, Stellweg went on to turn out to be an early promoter of Latin American artists together with Liliana Porter, Ana Mendieta and Luis Camnitzer via her New York galleries Stellweg–Seguy Gallery and Carla Stellweg Latin American & Modern Artwork. She was additionally a member of the school at College of Visible Arts in New York since 2005.

November

Artist Llyn Foulkes

A Renaissance man who resisted the rote taxonomy of style, Foulkes was a painter, jazz musician, filmic muse and artwork world troublemaker, bucking the business commodification of his observe all through his lengthy profession. His diverse, anarchic observe, which he termed “constantly inconsistent”, didn’t all the time endear him to the artwork institution, however his trailblazing legacy units him aside as a paragon of originality.

December

Artist Arnulf Rainer

Born in 1929 in Baden, Austria, Rainer got here of age within the aftermath of World Battle II as a stressed enfant horrible who distanced himself from tutorial traditions. All through his profession, Rainer resisted simple categorisation. Although related at varied occasions with Artwork Brut, Summary Expressionism, and Viennese Actionism, he remained fiercely unbiased, sceptical of actions and labels alike.

Artist Ceal Floyer

Ceal Floyer turned well-known within the Nineteen Nineties for her minimalist aesthetic that always performed with scale, language and which means. Examples embody her early work Gentle Swap (1992–99), a part of the Tate assortment, made up of a projector beaming the picture of a lightweight swap onto the wall, and Nail Biting Efficiency (2001), wherein she bit her nails right into a microphone.

Photographer Martin Parr

Parr was one of many UK’s best-known photographers and one of many few practitioners of the medium who developed a profile far past the business. He additionally led the pack of documentary photographers who, for the previous 50 years, have sought to discover and mirror the id of the British Isles via what typically can seem—deliberately so—as happenstance snap.