The

Artists

Who

Ruled

the

Biennial

Circuit

Over

the

Last

Four

Years

Who are the artists who are getting the most attention from international curators—not just in one show, but in many? I’ve done the exercise of tallying up names before. It helps to give substance to vague impressions I have, while also always snapping into focus things I had totally failed to notice. With the major media moment of the Venice Biennale coming up the first of May, it seemed like a good time to try it again.

I looked at artists appearing in biennials or similar major art exhibitions that opened after the 2022 Venice Biennale (not including it), and up to the 2026 Venice Biennale (including it). Basically, I wanted to see what had changed or stayed the same since the last time I did a similar piece on “Biennial Artists,” back in 2022. (It’s not a comparable number of years—that time, I looked at five years of shows, while this represents roughly four, so I am not comparing directly.)

I picked 130 recurring global art events, looking at the artists in any editions that went on view in this time period. That list includes all the major art biennials and triennials, plus a host of smaller or more specialized ones (and a few that have since closed, like the Front Triennial in the Cleveland area, as well as ones that have been thrown into chaos by politics, such as the Dhaka Art Summit).

As a selection, I think the list offers a good cross-section of the global curatorial conversation around contemporary art, spanning continents, and giving me a sense of what’s going on out of my very fragmentary, U.S.-centric view. Of course, if you included different events, you’d get a slightly different mix of figures. For transparency’s sake, I have listed the 130 events I considered at the end of this post.