Sean Burns

A packed survey at the National Portrait Gallery in London reveals an artist who was the architect of his own myth

On the courage and vulnerability of the painter’s diverse subjects – from ancient deities to modern martyrs – ahead of her show at Frith Street Gallery in London

On the eve of the Games, the city’s sports-related cultural offerings prove artists and athletes have more in common than we think 

At 798CUBE, Beijing, the artist presents marvels of engineering with lives of their own

Highlights also include Benjamin Mullinkosson’s club kids from Chengdu and intimate gallery sessions in Glaswegian living rooms

The artist has turned Punta della Dogana in Venice into a world of autonomous AI installations and isolated marine creatures

Adriano Pedrosa’s biennial raises essential questions about representation in the art world, but unfortunately, it feels disjointed

A personal response to the influential artist and performer ahead of his homecoming retrospective and residency in Manchester 

Other highlights include Flora Dunster and Theo Gordon’s anthology of queer photography and the return of Artists Behind Bars

From gallery expansions and closures to social media complicating relational aesthetics, three frieze editors discuss the year in art

From a posthumous Martin Wong retrospective in Camden to Matthew Arthur Williams’s sensitive debut in Dundee 

At the Fine Arts Museum, the greatest delights of ‘Small World’ are artworks that play with an absence of body or sound

Highlights include an album of music produced by visual artists and a cornucopia of hot new shows

Sean Burns on living with a cherished David LaChapelle portrait of the fashion icon

Tom Jeffreys speaks with the festival director ahead of her first edition in charge of the programme

From new fiction by Isabel Allende to the first Bulgarian novel to win the Man Booker International, the frieze team recommend new favourites and future classics

A collaboration between designer Jonathan Anderson and sculptor Lynda Benglis raises questions about the role of art on the runway

At the centre of the artist’s exhibition at Paris’s Bourse de Commerce is a sophisticated collage of her life in film

Other highlights include Plaster, a quarterly poster magazine dedicated to contemporary artists, and a new stage adaption of Derek Jarman’s Blue 

The artist discusses his first survey, at Hayward Gallery, London, which ambitiously reconfigures his acclaimed spaces and sculptures