A pair of Dutch taxidermists who worked with Damien Hirst open their own museum next week.

The Art Zoo Museum opens its doors in Amsterdam on Thursday when visitors will be able to see the work of Ferry van Tongeren and Jaap Sinke who share Hirst’s fascination with preserving dead animals and in 2016 sold their first collection to the British artist.

The museum's collection, which includes birds, snakes and crocodiles, is housed in a 17th-century canal-side house described by the pair as a "modern, artistic cabinet of curiosities."

Ukrainian artist Lesia Vasylchenko won the $10,000 PinchukArtCentre Prize and promptly gave away the prize money to support her country's army.

The prize for Ukrainian artists aged 35 or younger is funded by businessman and collector Victor Pinchuk and is now in its eighth year.

Vasylchenko's win means she is automatically shortlisted for the next edition of the Future Generation Art Prize—a worldwide contemporary art prize for artists 35 or younger.

A $7 million deal has been signed to save a Brutalist East German works canteen and transform it into an arts center.

The Robotron canteen in Dresden, described as a "gem of modernism", will become home to the Ostrale art festival and the Kunsthaus Dresden.

Designed between 1969 and 1972, the graffiti-covered building survived the collapse of the state-owned technology firm that failed after the fall of the Berlin Wall but was scheduled for demolition in 2016 before a campaign was launched to save it.

The surviving family of Spanish dictator Francisco Franco have been ordered to return two Romanesque statues to the city of Santiago de Compestela.

They were originally part of a 12th century entrance to the city's cathedral but were removed and bought by local authorities in 1948 and then sent to Franco after his wife expressed an interest in them during a visit to the city.

Spain's supreme court said the gift was "motivated by a desire to please the wife of the head of state" and ruled they belonged to the city.

It comes after the country’s Culture Ministry said it had begun to return some 5,126 works of art and artifacts seized under Franco’s rule after the end of the Spanish Civil War in 1939.

The "deep bonds" between Vincent van Gogh and the unassuming family that were his neighbors in Arles are at the heart of a Boston exhibition.

The show, at the city's Museum of Fine Arts until September 7, includes 14 portraits he made of members of the Roulin family - postman Joseph; his wife Augustine and their three children.

It also includes 10 letters written by Roulin to Van Gogh while the painter was being treated in a psychiatric hospital at Saint-Rémy.

Museum director Matthew Teitelbaum, who retires next month, said the exhibition offered "the opportunity to see the full flowering of Van Gogh’s artistic aspirations", adding the artist's clarity "may have emerged, in part, because of his very deep bonds with the postman and his family”.

1 - Husband-and-wife artists Refik Anadol and Efsun Erkilic are opening their museum of AI art at Frank Gehry-designed The Grand LA in Los Angeles this year. Anadol's work, Machine Hallucinations – ISS Dreams – A, was the top lot in Christie's controversial AI auction selling for $277,200.

2 - Nearly 70,000 people visited London's Tate Modern to see the UK AIDS Memorial Quilt during its recent five-day display in the Turbine Hall. The figure is by far the highest number of people to have ever seen the Quilt, which commemorates the lives of those who died from AIDS-related illness in the UK from the 1980s to today.

3 - A new drama inspired by the theft of Caravaggio’s Saint Jerome Writing has its premiere at Malta’s Mediterrane Film Festival on Sunday. The film is based on the real theft of the work from St. John’s Co-Cathedral in Valletta in 1984 and its recovery two years later.