As 2026 dawns, we pay tribute to the artists, curators, writers, sellers and different artwork world personalities who died in 2025. Under is a collection of our obituaries for the 12 months (click on on the particular person’s identify 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 Trendy artwork orthodoxy throughout work, sculptures, prints and extra. She made works harking back to Andy Warhol that riffed on promoting iconography, intricate collages and transfers evocative of Robert Rauschenberg, and work primarily based on the flag and map of the US that interpollated Jasper Johns.
Artist and movie director David Lynch
Along with portray and transferring picture work, Lynch pursued printmaking, sculpture and images; in 2021-22, a survey of his images travelled to establishments in Switzerland and Denmark. In images, he instructed Time Out his greatest influences have 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 instructed Artforum in 2019. “It’s espresso and cigarettes, perhaps some crimson wine.”
February
Artist Mel Bochner
Bochner’s work attested to the originality, adaptability and mental rigour of artwork rooted in seriality, guidelines and knowledge programs. His 1966 work 36 Images and 12 Diagrams consists of a grid of the titular 48 objects, depicting grids of numbers and images of wood 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 modern artwork in its heady youth 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 reminiscent of Huang Yong Ping, Qiu Zhijie and Cao Fei.
Might
Curator Koyo Kouoh
Koyo Kouoh, a large of the modern artwork world who tirelessly championed African artists and have become the primary lady from the continent to curate the Venice Biennale, which opens subsequent Might, died in Might, aged 57. In Dakar, Senegal, she based Uncooked Materials Firm, an impartial artwork centre. In 2016, she joined the Zeitz Museum of Modern Artwork Africa in Cape City, serving as curator and govt director.
Sebastião Salgado at his exhibition Amazônia on the Science Museum in London in 2021Photograph: SMP Information/Alamy Reside Information
Photographer Sebastião Salgado
Salgado might be remembered primarily for collection reminiscent of 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 finest recognized for Gold (2019), wherein he photographed greater than 50,000 miners teetering on roughly assembled ladders and churning by way of 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 instructed The Artwork Newspaper: “The contribution Alan made to British tradition was immense. A variety of worldwide creativity turned accessible to all by way of these documentaries.”
June
Sculptor Joel Shapiro
Within the Seventies, Shapiro turned recognized for his diminutive cast-iron home sculptures—melancholic, floor-dwelling subversions of sculpture’s stuffy gravitas within the white dice. Finest recognized for his vibrant, isomorphic statues constructed from wood beams, Shapiro straddled the road between abstraction and figuration in his artwork follow, 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 up accountability for Thames & Hudson whereas nonetheless a really younger man—following his father Walter’s early dying in 1967—he introduced a single-minded power and mental bravura to the duty of growing 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 impartial household agency is nearly 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 have been the topic of an exhibition at SFMOMA (San Francisco Museum of Trendy 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 fashion 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 modern artwork scene within the 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.
Collector and philanthropist Agnes GundPhotograph: Daniel Leal-Olivas / PA Photos / Alamy Inventory Photograph
September
Philanthropist Agnes Gund
Gund, who died in September aged 87, was a number one determine within the artwork world who was broadly celebrated for her important 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 Trendy Artwork in New York, stated in a press release forThe Artwork Newspaper. “She was a tireless champion of artists and a fierce believer within the energy of artwork to vary 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 by way of her New York galleries Stellweg–Seguy Gallery and Carla Stellweg Latin American & Modern Artwork. She was additionally a member of the college at Faculty 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 follow all through his lengthy profession. His various, anarchic follow, which he termed “persistently 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 Conflict II as a stressed enfant horrible who distanced himself from tutorial traditions. All through his profession, Rainer resisted straightforward categorisation. Although related at varied instances with Artwork Brut, Summary Expressionism, and Viennese Actionism, he remained fiercely impartial, sceptical of actions and labels alike.
Artist Ceal Floyer
Ceal Floyer turned well-known within the Nineteen Nineties for her minimalist aesthetic that usually performed with scale, language and that means. Examples embody her early work Gentle Change (1992–99), a part of the Tate assortment, made up of a projector beaming the picture of a light-weight change 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 trade. He additionally led the pack of documentary photographers who, for the previous 50 years, have sought to discover and replicate the identification of the British Isles by way of what typically can seem—deliberately so—as happenstance snap.
Martin Parr in 2015Photograph: David Owens
