A host of exhibitions and events this month and next celebrate the 100th anniversary of the birth of the Swiss artist Jean Tinguely, one of the godfathers of kinetic and auto-destructive art. Ben Luke speaks to Roland Wetzel, the director of the Tinguely Museum in Basel about the artist’s life and work, and the events marking the centenary. In Rotterdam in the Netherlands, Fenix, a museum about migration, has just opened, featuring a dramatic stainless steel tornado form on its roof. We discuss the museum with its director, Anne Kremers. And this episode’s Work of the Week is by an immigrant artist, Ben Shahn, who was born in modern-day Lithuania but travelled as a child to the US, where he became a leading painter associated with Social Realism. Among his greatest achievements was the mural The Meaning of Social Security, painted between 1940 and 1942 in Washington D.C. to reflect the benefits of the then-recent Social Security Act. Shahn is the subject of a major show that opened this week at the Jewish Museum in New York. We speak to Laura Katzman, the curator of the exhibition, about Harvesting Wheat (1941), Shahn’s study for one of the figures in the mural.

The Tinguely Museum in Basel, Switzerland, has a permanent display of his work; Scream Machines–Art Ghost Train, by Rebecca Moss and Augustin Rebetez, Tinguely Museum, until 30 August; Mechanics and Humanity: Eva Aeppli and Jean Tinguely, Lehmbruck Museum, Duisburg, Germany, until 24 August; Niki de Saint Phalle & Jean Tinguely: Myths & Machines, Hauser & Wirth Somerset, Bruton, UK, until 1 February 2026; Niki de Saint Phalle, Jean Tinguely, Pontus Hultén, Grand Palais, Paris, 20 June-4 January 2026.

The Fenix museum is open now.

Ben Shahn: On Nonconformity, Jewish Museum, New York, 23 May-12 October. The book accompanying it published on 3 June by Princeton University Press, priced $45.00/£38.00.

The Meaning of Social Security murals:

https://art.gsa.gov/artworks/637/the-meaning-of-social-security?ctx=3bc918796c456cc8fb8e3d3f033918d4249d0ce6&idx=6

https://livingnewdeal.org/sites/wilbur-j-cohen-building-shahn-frescoes-washington-dc/#lg=1&slide=1

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Koyo Kouoh remembered, Queen Elizabeth II memorial, Jasper Johns by Robert Storr

Koyo Kouoh, the Cameroon-born curator who was director of Zeitz Mocaa in Cape Town and had been invited to curate next year’s Venice Biennale died on 10 May. There has been an outpouring of moving tributes to Kouoh from artists, curators and gallerists across the world, and Ben Luke speaks to Nolan Oswald Dennis, the Johannesburg-based artist who has a current show at Zeitz, and Liza Essers, the owner and director of Goodman Gallery, about her life and work. A design competition for the Queen Elizabeth II National Memorial in St James’s Park in London has been launched, with five designs competing for the commission. We talk to Sandy Nairne, the former director of the National Portrait Gallery in London, who is on the committee tasked with choosing the winning design. And this episode’s Work of the Week is Regrets, a painting from the series of that name made by Jasper Johns in 2013. The work is discussed in a new book of writings on Johns by the former curator at the Museum of Modern Art and of the Venice Biennale in 2007, Robert Storr. We speak to Storr about the work.

Nolan Oswald Dennis: Understudies, Zeitz Mocaa, Cape Town, South Africa, until 27 July; Nolan Oswald Dennis: throwers, Gasworks, London, until 22 June.

To see the five proposals for the Queen Elizabeth II National Memorial and give feedback visit competitions.malcolmreading.com/queenelizabethmemorial#overview. The opportunity to give feedback on the designs will close on 19 May.

Robert Storr, Focal Points: Jasper Johns, HENI publishing, £19.99 (hb).

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This week: after a two-year closure, the National Gallery’s Sainsbury Wing reopens this week, revealing a major overhaul by the architect Annabelle Selldorf. The gallery has also rehung its entire collection and Ben Luke takes a tour of both the revamped building and the new displays with the National Gallery director, Gabriele Finaldi. Tate Modern celebrates its 25th anniversary this weekend, and Luke talks to The Art Newspaper’s contemporary art correspondent Louisa Buck and another of our regular contributors, Dale Berning Sawa, about its seismic impact in London and beyond over the past quarter of a century, its complex present circumstances and its future. And this episode’s Work of the Week is the late German artist Inge Mahn’s sculpture Balancing Towers (1989). It is a key work in an exhibition called “Are we still up to it?” – Art & Democracy at the Herrenchiemsee, the castle on an island in the Chiemsee lake, in southern Bavaria, Germany. Oliver Kase, the director of collections at the Pinakothek der Moderne, in Munich, and co-curator of the exhibition, joins Luke to discuss the sculpture.

The Sainsbury Wing and CC Land: The Wonder of Art, National Gallery, London, from 10 May. You can hear a conversation with Annabelle Selldorf about the Frick Collection on the episode of this podcast from 28 March 2025. And our interview with the architectural critic Rowan Moore reflecting on the debate about Selldorf’s alterations to the original Sainsbury Wing project is in the episode from 4 November 2022.

Tate Modern’s 25th Birthday Weekender, Tate Modern, London, 9-12 May.

“Are we still up to it?” – Art & Democracy, Herrenchiemsee Palace, Chiemsee, Germany, 10 May-12 October

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