Alisa Medvedeva’s career is already impressive by any measure: international prizes, Mariinsky appearances, European festival triumphs, collaborations with Andrea Bocelli and Il Divo. Trained at the Saint Petersburg Conservatoire, where she graduated in 2024, the young soprano built her foundation with discipline before the spotlight ever found her. Prizewinner at both the Rachmaninov and Stravinsky international competitions, she stepped confidently from academic stages into professional ones — from the Mariinsky Theatre to major European festivals.

In the past two seasons alone, Medvedeva has shared the stage with Il Divo, Andrea Bocelli and Vittorio Grigolo, performed at the Wiener Stadthalle, appeared in Bucharest’s Unforgettable Festival, and is now preparing for Dubai Opera. It is an impressive trajectory — and yet, speaking with Moral Mode magazine, she returns repeatedly not to fame, but to readiness. For her, a career is not a sprint of engagements; it is a slow and deliberate shaping of voice, character and self.

Your voice has already taken you to stages such as Dubai Opera and Palazzo Colonna, alongside artists like Andrea Bocelli and Vittorio Grigolo. What have these collaborations taught you about presence and artistry at the highest level?

Working alongside artists of that level changes your perception of the stage. What I understood very clearly is that excellence is never accidental. It is built on discipline and deep respect for the audience. No matter how large the venue or how prestigious the event, they approach every performance with the same seriousness.

I realized how important it is to remain in constant readiness—vocally, emotionally, mentally. When people come to listen to you, they deserve your full attention and your very best. Being on stage is not about status; it is about responsibility.

You will perform in Monaco on March 9—a place deeply connected to classical music and refined audiences. What does performing here mean to you at this moment in your career?

Monaco is very personal to me. My family lives there, my sister studies there, and many of our family moments are connected to this place. It holds warmth for me beyond music.
Returning there as an artist feels different. It is not just another engagement—it feels like sharing something I have been building for years. To stand on stage in a city that is part of my personal story makes this concert especially meaningful.

Having performed roles such as Musetta, Zerlina, and Papagena—all women with distinct personalities —which character feels closest to your own temperament, and why?

Musetta, without hesitation. She is often perceived as playful and light, but she is much deeper than that. What touches me most is her transformation in the final act of La Bohème. When everything becomes serious, when Mimì is dying, Musetta shows sincerity and compassion. The theatricality disappears, and her true humanity appears. That emotional honesty resonates with me very strongly.

You are now based in Vienna, a city synonymous with musical tradition. How does living and studying there influence your artistic discipline and daily life?

Vienna has a special atmosphere. Music is everywhere—in rehearsal rooms, in concert halls, in conversations. It naturally pushes you toward growth because you are constantly surrounded by high standards.
Attending performances, observing other musicians, studying—it becomes part of daily life. You absorb inspiration almost unconsciously. The city keeps you focused and motivated.

As a rising soprano attracting international attention, how do you balance ambition with patience in a career that demands both technical perfection and emotional depth?

Patience is essential, especially for a singer. The voice cannot be rushed. Technique requires time and careful work. You have to respect your instrument and allow it to develop naturally.
At the same time, you must keep moving forward—developing stage presence, acting skills, musical understanding. You cannot force yourself into roles you are not ready for, but you also cannot stand still. For me, it is about steady progress, without losing balance.

JAEGER LECOULTRE PRESENTS THE IMAGE TELLERS HUSSAIN ALMOOSAWI & MONA ALGWAIZ

• Reinventing the 8th Art: imagining the future of photography in an era where images can be generated as easily as they are captured

 

• A dialogue across time: Hussain AlMoosawi's photography anchors memory and origin, while Mona Algwaiz's AI-assisted digital practice projects heritage into speculative futures
• ‘Bridge in Time’: five immersive artworks inspired by historic Arabic architectural symbols, where past, present and future coexist

In 2026, photography marks its bicentenary - yet in the age of AI, image-making has never been more challenged. Hussain AlMoosawi, Emirati photographer and Mona Algwaiz, Saudi Artificial Intelligence digital artist, bring their creative talent to Jaeger-LeCoultre’s Made of Makers™ programme. In their commissioned series, Hussain AlMoosawi’s photographs capture traditional Middle Eastern design codes - from architecture and ornament to urban details - which Mona Algwaiz then projects into speculative, futuristic environments through her digital practice.


PUSHING FURTHER THE BOUNDARIES OF CLASSICAL ARTS
 
The Made of Makers™ programme draws a parallel between the worlds of horology and art, fostering collaborations with artists, designers, and craftsmen from disciplines outside watchmaking, who share the Maison’s values of creativity, expertise, and precision. The programme challenges the perception of classical arts as static or bound to the past, instead emphasising their continuous reinvention and honouring them as a leading source of creativity today. Just as today’s classics were once seen as radical at their inception, the Made of Makers™ programme explores how traditional forms and techniques can be reinvented through new materials and media, offering a fresh perspective on the dialogue between past and present. Like the watchmakers of La Grande Maison, these artists respect tradition as a foundation for creativity, while pushing boundaries and exploring new horizons, highlighting how both watchmaking and classical art express human creativity, reflect the culture of an era and trigger emotions.

To date, the Made of Makers™ community has embraced the worlds of contemporary visual art, gastronomy, music and perfumery – with artists including Zimoun (Switzerland), Michael Murphy (USA), Guillaume Marmin (France), lettering artist Alex Trochut (Spain/USA), pastry chef Nina Métayer (France), mixologist Matthias Giroud (France), digital media artist Yiyun Kang (Korea), musician TØKIO M¥ERS (UK), multi-media artist Brendi Wedinger (USA), Chef Himanshu Saini (India), street light-painter Roy Wang (China), architect Abdalla Almulla (UAE), perfumer Nicolas Bonneville (France), designer Khalid Shafar (UAE), chef-chocolatier Mathieu Davoine (France/Switzerland), and animation film director Jackie Wang (China) and webcomic designer Lily May Catan/Olivecoat (Philippines). This new collaboration with Hussain AlMoosawi and Mona Algwaiz (UAE) adds the interpretation of photography to the Made of MakersTM portfolio.

FROM PHOTOGRAPHY TO IMMERSIVE PICTURING
 
Photography stands here as a point of origin: a medium of observation that captures real places, architectural forms and lived environments, anchoring memory in the present. From these tangible fragments of reality, a second layer of creation unfolds.
 
Through AI-assisted digital practices, the image is not altered or replaced, but expanded. It becomes immersive: no longer a surface to be viewed, but a space to be entered. Architecture stretches beyond its physical limits, time folds into itself, and familiar forms are projected into speculative futures.

 THE IMAGE TELLERS
 
An Emirati multidisciplinary creative, Hussain AlMoosawi brings over 20 years of experience across design, photography, and visual journalism. Over the course of his career, he kept pursuing an ongoing quest to rediscover the UAE’s urban landscapes, systematically documenting its often-overlooked modern architecture. 
A Saudi engineer and digital artist, Mona Algwaiz explores the intersection of artificial intelligence, cultural heritage, and speculative design. Through her practice, she reimagines landscapes, architectural forms, and collective memory, transforming familiar environments into futuristic visual narratives. She develops her practice at the crossroads of technology, design, and cultural storytelling, reshaping Saudi Arabia’s built and natural environments into new futures.

 ‘BRIDGE IN TIME’: FIVE COMPOSITE IMAGES WHERE PAST AND FUTURE COEXIST
 
With ‘Bridge in Time’, Hussain AlMoosawi and Mona Algwaiz give a new perspective to the 8th art by creating immersive compositions where past and future flow into one another. By confronting archival motifs with imagined cityscapes, their work stages a dialogue between continuity and transformation: how can cultural heritage be preserved while embracing innovation and new tools such as AI? This echoes the mission of the Maison: to protect an identity built over two centuries while continuously reinventing its forms, materials and techniques. The result is a set of composite images where past and future coexist within the same visual plane.

Left photo: the MAZE/Art Awards F.P.Journe prize ceremony. From left to right : Stephanie Seidel, Felipe Dmab, Tatyana Franck, Maja Hoffmann and François-Paul Journe.

 For its third edition, Art Gstaad took place from 19 to 22 February 2026 under the Festival-Zelt marquee, in the heart of the Bernese village. On this occasion, a new MAZE/Art Awards F.P.Journe was presented to Sonia Gomes for Untitled, 2024, represented by the Mendes Wood DM gallery. This distinction is accompanied by the acquisition of the work by F.P.Journe, which will subsequently be proposed to the Kunstmuseum Basel.

The winner of this edition was selected by an international jury composed of Tatyana Franck (President of L’Alliance New York), Stephanie Seidel (Head of Contemporary Art at the Kunstmuseum Basel) and Maja Hoffmann (Founder and President of the LUMA Foundation).

Art Gstaad forms part of the constellation of fairs developed by MAZE. Conceived on a human scale, it favours a rigorous curatorial approach and a deliberately focused format. This new edition brought together a selection of international galleries, including Landau Fine Art, De Jonckheere, Pace, Thaddaeus Ropac, Capitain Petzel, Mendes Wood DM, Semiose, Mennour, Hélène Bailly Marcilhac and Jousse Entreprise. The presentation juxtaposed museum quality works, ranging from historical pieces by Roy Lichtenstein, Alberto Giacometti, Fernand Léger and Pieter Brueghel the Younger to contemporary works by Eric Fischl, Loie Hollowell and Monica Bonvicini, as well as twentieth century design, notably by Charlotte Perriand.

Through this partnership, F.P.Journe develops an approach to patronage founded on continuity and the circulation of works within an ecosystem of fairs. Conceived as an initiative intended to unfold over time, the MAZE/Art Awards F.P.Journe are designed to accompany the various platforms developed by MAZE from one edition to the next, within an evolving dynamic that takes into account the artistic contexts and the venues that host them.

The values that define F.P.Journe, Authenticity, Rarity and Talent, are naturally reflected in this initiative. Brought together under the acronym “A.R.T.”, they express the close bond the Manufacture maintains with artistic creation in all its forms, as well as its commitment to its transmission.
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Tarek Atoui, The Drift, installation view, Institut d’art contemporain, Villeurbanne/Rhône-Alpes, France (2023). Photo: Thomas Lannes.

Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, Ireland
February 21 — July 19, 2026

Tarek Atoui’s exhibition at IMMA is presented in two phases, comprising an installation, titled Souffle Continu, in the Chapel that focuses on the tactile quality of the sound, vibration, and movement of “wind instruments”. In the gallery spaces, Sunflowers presents a series of works inspired by the rhythmic and material traditions of Korean drumming.
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GSTAAD, SWITZERLAND—Nahmad Contemporary is pleased to present PICASSO | PAINTER AND MODEL, Reflections by Naomi Campbell, on view at Tarmak22 in Gstaad, from February 14 through March 15, 2026. This exhibition brings together a selection of fourteen paintings from Picasso’s consequential late series Le Peintre et son modèle (The painter and his model). Painted between 1963 and 1965, this tightly curated group of works marks a pivotal moment of introspection and creative freedom at the end of Picasso’s career. Living at his final residence, Notre-Dame-de-Vie, Mougins, with his wife Jacqueline Roque during this period, Picasso turned to the act of painting as his primary subject matter. The canvases in this series depict variations of a single scene: an artist at his easel with a nude woman posing before him, perhaps symbolizing Picasso and Jacqueline. Through various iterations of this motif, Picasso interrogates the complex relationship between artist and subject, probing the dynamics of perception, desire, and power at play.
The perspective of international supermodel Naomi Campbell, one of fashion’s most influential muses, sheds new light on the charged encounters that Picasso constructs across this body of work. Drawing from her lived experience of inhabiting the gaze, Campbell brings a contemporary voice to the questions surrounding visibility and vulnerability, authorship and control, and the complexities of being seen that lie at the heart of this series.
While Picasso explored the archetypes of artist and model in earlier works, his investigations into these subjects took on a heightened sense of self-consciousness at the end of his life. The vivid palette and striking economy of form Picasso employs throughout this series of the 1960s reflect an urgency and expressive intensity unparalleled in his previous paintings on the theme. Across this suite of canvases, viewers find Picasso undertaking what would prove to be his most focused existential investigation into the creative process.
Picasso’s relationship to Jacqueline, his beloved muse, forms an important backdrop to this series. Due to Picasso’s age and celebrity, the pair adopted a relatively reclusive existence at Notre-Dame-de-Vie, and, in their isolation, their daily lives were inextricably intertwined. Though Jacqueline did not typically sit for Picasso, she remained a constant presence, becoming the subject of hundreds of paintings, drawings, prints, and sculptures collectively. Moreover, her devoted management of the couple’s domestic world allowed Picasso to maintain the rigorous cadence of his practice throughout his final years. The intimate proximity of the two figures within this group of paintings — with one 1964 example even depicting the model’s body fusing with the artist’s canvas — may conjure the parallel entanglement of art and love within their marriage. As the painter and model take turns looking at one another, tensions between sensuality and detached observation, power and deference emerge. As Campbell observes, “Picasso’s paintings remind us that intimacy doesn’t require access, and that what is withheld can be even more powerful than what is at times revealed.” Through his compelling portrayals of the relationship between the series’ archetypal protagonists, he continuously returns viewers to a central inquiry: who controls the gaze and how does it shape us? 
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The historical context of the 1960s further underscores the critical depth of these works. In this decade, figuration had largely fallen out of favor in the art world amid the widespread turn toward abstraction. While Picasso rarely spoke of the creative movements of his time, he nevertheless remained skeptical of art’s break with the objective world. Through the mid-1950s and early 1960s, he completed numerous variations on canonical paintings, including Eugène Delacroix’s Les Femmes d’Alger, Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas, and Édouard Manet’s Le Dejeuner sur l’herbe — measuring himself against the masters of the figurative tradition in order to prove his standing among them. Created on the heels of these works, and immediately preceding his celebrated Mosqueteros, Le Peintre et son modèle finds the artist again contemplating his legacy and particular role within art history — this time, by taking on one of the most iconic tropes of figurative art. 


PICASSO | PAINTER AND MODEL, Reflections by Naomi Campbell brings together some of the most distinguished examples from this body of work, previously featured in major exhibitions at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, Fondation Beyeler, Riehen, Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, among other institutions. With Campbell’s unique insights, this presentation offers a contemporary look at the complexities that define Le Peintre et son modèle, the nature of representation, and the seductive power of what remains just beyond reach.


Pablo Picasso in his studio at Notre-Dame-de-Vie, Mougins, 1963.
© Robert Doisneau / Getty Images. © 2026 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

​ Image : Franz Gertsch, 'Natascha IV', (1987-1988) © 2026 Franz Gertsch AG. Photo: Dominique Uldry.

Franz Gertsch
Hauser & Wirth Zurich, Bahnhofstrasse
19 March – 16 May 2026
On view this spring at Hauser & Wirth Zurich, Bahnhofstrasse, is an exhibition by the celebrtaed Swiss artist Franz Gertsch. Curated by Tobia Bezzola, the presentation offers an exemplary view of  Gertsch’s rigorously precise and transcendent vision, bringing together important large-scale and medium-format works showcasing his practice in both woodcuts and painting.

The exhibition in Zurich anticipates two upcoming Gertsch exhibitions in Switzerland: the travelling exhibition ‘Franz Gertsch.Blow-Up’ at the Kunstmuseum Bern opening this August, and ‘Franz Gertsch. Iron Bed and Trumpet, Family and Couples’ at Museum Franz Gertsch opening 20 March 2026.
 

TAYLOR SWIFT WEARS ZUHAIR MURAD COUTURE TO INTRODUCE  THE OPALITE SINGLE
  
Taylor Swift has released Opalite, a 7” vinyl single off her album The Life of a Showgirl, revealing artwork featuring a ZUHAIR MURAD Couture bodysuit. Taylor is wearing a fully embroidered silver bodysuit featuring a crossed neckline, cut-out bodice and winged 3D embellishments from the ZUHAIR MURAD Couture Spring 2021 Collection. Photography by: Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott.

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Gala in St. Moritz during the White Turf weekend, 21 February 2026.