One of the World’s Greatest Art Collections Hides Behind This Fence

The drab free port zone near the Geneva city center, a compound of blocky gray and vanilla warehouses surrounded by train tracks, roads and a barbed-wire fence, looks like the kind of place where beauty goes to die. But within its walls, crated or sealed cheek by jowl in cramped storage vaults, are more than […]

First look: inside the Switch House – Tate Modern’s power pyramid

Among the shafts of luxury flats sprouting up along the south bank of the Thames, from Battersea to Bermondsey, there is one new tower unlike the others. It is made of brick, not glass, and stands as a squat, truncated pyramid, twisting as it rises. Punctured only by thin slit windows, Tate Modern’s new extension […]

Can a Giant New Museum Make San Francisco an Art Capital?

If you build it, they will come. Or that’s what the board at the San Francisco Museum of Art is betting on. This week, the 81-year-old institution opens its doors after a three-year renovation, gifting the West Coast with a world-class collection that would make MoMA blush. Sure, you can see Richard Serra in New […]

Herzog and De Meuron: Tate Modern’s architects on their radical new extension

Jacques Herzog, the more talkative half of the pair of boyhood friends who founded the architectural practice Herzog & De Meuron, is worried about the world. “The things based on the five senses that we like so much, all these values – that we treat people well. They are in danger. There is such a […]

4 Ways Snøhetta’s SFMoMA Expansion Changes the Way You View Art

SAN FRANCISCO — Viewed head-on, the newly-expanded San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMoMA) presents an odd progression of landmark architectural styles in no chronological order. First up is SFMoMA’s original home, a 1995 postmodernist red-brick building by the Swiss architect Mario Botta. Behind Botta is San Francisco’s very first skyscraper, Timothy Pflueger’s 1925 Art […]

Forget the Loft: The Newest Trend in Luxury Real Estate is Walls

For Wendy Maitland, Town Residential’s president of sales, an Oscar-winning director client of hers was a typical real estate shopper with typical requests. He had a seven-figure budget and was keen to buy into one of the many new luxury condo complexes sprouting around Manhattan. The client was downsizing from a huge country house in Connecticut since his […]

Philippe Parreno Announced As 2016 Hyundai Commission At Tate Modern Turbine Hall

Philippe Parreno will undertake this year’s Hyundai Commission for the Turbine Hall, at Tate ~Modern opening on 4 October 2016. Parreno is a French artist who works across film, video, sound, sculpture, performance and information technology. A key artist of his generation, Parreno explores the borders between reality and fiction and is known for investigating and […]

Crunching the Numbers Behind the Boom in Private Art Museums

What kind of person opens a private contemporary art museum? According to a new reportby the art collector database Larry’s List and the Chinese art market site Artron, he’s probably in his 60s or his 70s; he’s probably from South Korea, the US, or Germany; he probably founded his museum in the last 15 years; and he’s most […]

Why Clyfford Still’s art stayed hidden for 30 years

Painter finally set to take his place alongside Rothko, Pollock and other abstract expressionist pioneers. Following his death in 1980 all the works by Abstract Expressionist painter Clyfford Still that had not previously been shown or exhibited were immediately put into storage and sealed off from public view. They have remained under lock and key […]

The Geometric Aesthetics of Piet Mondrian’s Studios

Mondrian wrote in 1927 about his ideas on his rather extreme interior design: The interior of the home must no longer be an accumulation of rooms formed by four walls with nothing but holes instead of doors and windows, but a construction of coloured and colourless planes, combined with furniture and equipment, which must be nothing […]

The 10 Best Cultural Buildings of 2015

Museums and galleries bring out the best in ambitious architects. Here are 10 of the best cultural buildings of the year, from Renzo Piano’s Whitney in New York to Pattersons’ Len Lye Centre in New Plymouth, New Zealand.

Shocked By Assemble’s Turner Prize Win? Here Are 9 Other Artist/Architects You Should Know

The awarding of this year’s Turner Prize to the London-based architecture collective Assemble caused a stir in Britain earlier this week—and not the usual tabloid tempest-in-a-teapot. Rather, the complaints came from the cognoscenti; some critics argued that, although the group was doing important work by renovating derelict rowhouses and setting up local enterprises in a depressed area of Liverpool, […]

UK’s Top Art Award, the Turner Prize, Won by Architecture Project for Derelict Houses

The UK’s Turner Prize for 2015 has been won by Assemble, a collective group of architects that has restored derelict houses. London-based Assemble, formed by about 18 “activist architects” in their twenties, recently renovated a shabby housing estate in the Toxteth district of Liverpool, a city in northern England. Assemble was nominated both for this […]

Ai Weiwei’s Tree Installation At The Royal Academy

“Ai’s trees are made from parts of dead trees that are brought down from the mountains of southern China and sold in the markets of Jingdezhen, Jiangxi province. Ai transports these to his studio in Beijing where they are made into trees. As he says, “it’s just like trying to imagine what the tree looked […]

Artlyst Podcast: Tim Marlow And Adrian Locke Discuss Ai Weiwei At The RA

Artlyst recently attended the press view of the Royal Academy of Arts’ landmark exhibition of the Honorary Royal Academician, Ai Weiwei. Where the chief curators of this outstanding show, Tim Marlow, and Adrian Locke were kind enough to give Artlyst – and a host of other journalists – a tour of Ai Weiwei’s impressive retrospective. […]

Right Wing Politician Says Anish Kapoor ‘Has Declared War on France’

Anish Kapoor had no idea what he was getting into when he accepted the invitation to install artworks in the gardens of Versailles. On September 30, right wing politician Fabien Bouglé, a local councilman, published an article on the website of Nouvel Observateur in which he claims that the artist “has declared war on France” […]

The New Vancouver Art Gallery: A Generous Building

When the Vancouver Art Gallery revealed their conceptual design for a new building earlier this week, it was evidently a far cry from their current neoclassical courthouse.  Gone are the ionic columns, ornate marble and porticos; instead, Swiss architectural firm Herzog and de Meuron has developed a soaring, wood-wrapped structure with boxy levels that recalls West Coast […]

North Shore art collectors open new gallery

Brigitte and Henning Freybe will show work that might not be shown otherwise. A new public art gallery opening Saturday in North Vancouver is dedicated to showing the work of private collectors. It’s called Griffin Art Projects and is an initiative of Brigitte and Henning Freybe, two of Metro Vancouver’s major art collectors. The opening […]

The New Broad Museum Brings LA Lots of Blue-Chip Art and a Few Surprises

The wait is over. After a 15-month delay, ballooning costs, and lawsuits, the Broad Museum is finally set to open this Sunday in downtown Los Angeles. The new 120,000 square foot institution houses the postwar and contemporary art collection of Eli and Edythe Broad. For the past four decades, the couple has had an outsized […]

Ai Weiwei review – momentous and moving

Three-thousand porcelain river crabs clamber over one another in a great red, green and white sprawl of twitching legs and claws. Porcelain sunflower seeds are one thing, crabs another. Good thing they’re not quite real. This is but one small moment in the largest show Ai Weiwei has held in Britain. Not exactly a retrospective, […]