From the Venice Biennale to Palazzo Citterio in Milan to Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin — which opens a new venue on the Venetian island of San Giacomo next week — Italy is having a digital art moment.

The 61st edition of the Venice Biennale opens for previews on May 4 and to the public on May 9, with digital and interdisciplinary work woven throughout, most notably in the Vatican Pavilion, where FKA Twigs, Brian Eno, Dev Hynes, and more are presenting digital and audio pieces. Meanwhile, Palazzo Diedo will host “Strange Rules”, an exhibition curated by the artists Mat Dryhurst and Holly Herndon alongside Hans Ulrich Obrist and Adriana Rispoli, that will consider the concept of “Protocol Art“ — art that is designed to shape the rules of media and technology before they influence culture.

International foundations and museums are increasingly presenting digital practices not as novelty or experiment, but as means of coming to terms with the present moment. Venice has always been about identifying what matters in contemporary art. The fact that protocol-based work is being integrated across the Biennale suggests the mainstream art world is finally listening to what practitioners have known for years: that contemporary art, like life, depends on code, computation, and digital networks.

— Danielle King, Head of Community at Right Click Save

Georg Baselitz, one of the most significant figurative artists of his generation, known for inverting his paintings, and upending his subjects, has died at the age of 88. His death was announced on April 30, 2026, by Thaddaeus Ropac, one of the galleries that represented him.

A leading figure in the German art world for over 60 years, Baselitz freighted his early work with the devastation wrought on Europe’s landscape and population by the Second World War. Speaking once of his early life, he stated: “I was born into a destroyed order, a destroyed landscape, a destroyed people, a destroyed society. And I did not want to restore order.”

He first inverted figures in his paintings, breaking the conventions of figurative art, in 1968; challenging the viewer to engage only with the formal qualities of his work. The hierarchy, where the sky is at the top and the ground below, he said in 1984, is one “that we absolutely do not have to believe in”.

His death was announced a week before the opening of an exhibition devoted to “Eroi d’Oro”, his series of monumental self-portraits and portraits of his wife Elke Kretzschmar, at the Fondazione Giorgio Cini, in Venice. The exhibition, which opens on May 6, will run in conjunction with the 61st Venice Biennale.