Allan Kaprow, Before the Happenings

Considered the Father of the Happening, Kaprow started off as a painter whose work reflected a Cubist-inspired, pre-AbEx aesthetic. In his essay for the catalogue accompanying the exhibition ALLAN KAPROW. PAINTINGS NEW YORK at Hauser & Wirth’s uptown outpost, art historian Philip Ursprung describes Kaprow’s progression from painting to performance in three swift strokes: The story began […]

artnet News Critics’ Picks: The Most Memorable Artworks of 2016

While 2016 may have been pretty awful on any number of fronts, we have to admit that it also gave us a lot of pretty great art. Consider Maurizio Cattelan alone, who gave us a solid gold toilet to relieve ourselves on at New York’s Guggenheim Museum, a real life donkey, pooping in the tent […]

Martin Creed on Bloomberg’s ‘Brilliant Ideas’

With works spanning two decades that force us to pause, reflect, and see the world through fresh eyes, Martin Creed has challenged what it means to be an artist. Born in Wakefield, England in 1968, Creed grew up in Scotland where his father worked as a silversmith and lectured at Glasgow School of Art. Creed […]

For Art Dealers, the Place to Be Is Still London

These are early days, but the Hieronymus Bosch vision of a socioeconomic apocalypse that many feared would follow Britain’s June 23 vote to leave the European Union has yet to materialize.  True, the pound has lost about 10 percent of its value against other major currencies, and a huge amount of political uncertainty still remains, […]

Britain’s Top 50 Galleries You Should Know (and Visit)

artnet News picks the top of the crop in the UK.

Observing the Drama of the World: A Q&A with Stefan Brüggemann

For his first show at Hauser & Wirth, which opened Wednesday, June 29, Mexico City- and London-based artist Stefan Brüggemann covered the walls of the first floor of the gallery’s Upper-East-Side outpost with spray-painted scareheads ripped from recent news stories and quotes culled from classic films. Part of his ongoing “Headlines and Last Line in […]

Architect Annabelle Selldorf on Why Mega-Galleries Are Transforming Into Mini-Museums

If you are even a casual appreciator of art in New York, the chances are that you have stepped into one of Annabelle Selldorf’s spaces, and been entranced. Perhaps the most coveted architect among the minimalistically inclined art elite, Selldorf has designed a broad spectrum of the city’s art sites, from theNeue Galerie uptown, steeped […]

Martin Creed @ Hauser & Wirth’s Somerset Gallery

Immaculate in a grey suit, Martin Creed strides towards me in the car park at Durslade Farm, home of Hauser & Wirth’s Somerset gallery. He could be a businessman out on his lunch break on a spring day. Then I notice the spatters and whiplashes of paint all over his clothes, the splodges of colour […]

The unspoken reason why galleries are flocking to Los Angeles

Galleries like Sprüth Magers and Hauser Wirth & Schimmel quietly but fiercely compete for the city’s artists. The grand openings of the Los Angeles branches of European galleries Sprüth Magers and Hauser & Wirth (called Hauser Wirth & Schimmel), on 23 February and 13 March respectively, are sure to generate even more buzz about the […]

Defying Fears of a Cooling Market

“Buy the best, forget the rest” has become the conventional wisdom for collectors in today’s investment-minded art market. But what does “the best” mean? Clearly it meant different things to the 77,000 people who flocked to Art Basel Miami Beach this month. The fair, the last major event of 2015 for the hectic contemporary art […]

Off to the races: Miami Basel Begins, with Buoyant Sales Reports, a Bevy of Stella, and a Grab Bag of Celebrities

Art Basel Miami Beach opened its doors this morning to Earth’s primo art collectors, who perused the offerings from 267 galleries en route to snapping up works by blue-chip artists such as Picasso and Frank Stella, who continues his hot streak by having a dozen works spread among four different booths. Even more eye-catching are the text-based neon […]

10 Gallery Shows You Need to Pay Attention to This Fall

There have been persistent murmurs in the art world about the imminent (market) demise of the so-called Zombie Formalism movement, a kind of colorful, undemanding type of abstract painting that’s commanded astronomical prices for the past few years. Dire predictions and a few disappointing auction results aside, the evidence is hardly overwhelming. And yet, looking ahead to the fall’s most […]

2015 Fall Art Preview: The 28 New York Exhibitions Everyone Should See

The fall art season is quickly upon us as galleries in New York return from their August hibernation and bring out key shows to chase away the summer languor.  To help you navigate the mess of fall openings, we offer up a calendar of some of the exhibitions we’re most anticipating at museums and galleries […]

Christoph Büchel: The Mosque. Icelandic Pavilion at Venice Art Biennale 2015

Swiss artist Christoph Büchel was selected to represent Iceland at the 56th Art Biennale in Venice, Italy. His idea was to transform a church, Santa Maria della Misericordia at Campo de L’Abazia, into a mosque. Accordingly, the show is called The Mosque: The First Mosque in the Historic City of Venice and has been realized […]

Blood and Soil: Vienna Actionism’s Dangerous Game

Its Wikipedia entry calls it “a short and violent movement,” and even compared with the aesthetic extremes of the 1960s, the unrelenting art of Vienna Actionism stands apart. After the passage of fifty years, the questions it raised about the limits and origins of art remain no less troubling or closer to resolution. The four […]

Inside artist Louise Bourgeois’ New York home

Untouched since the day she died, Louise Bourgeois’ New York home-cum-studio offers an intimate portrait of the artist. At 13ft wide, the townhouse in New York that was both home and studio to Louise Bourgeois is almost as tiny as the artist herself. It was here, on the site of an old apple orchard, half […]

Phyllida Barlow: Dock, Tate Britain

A joyous celebration of ad hoc creativity fills the Duveen Galleries. The revamping of Tate Britain has produced such an atmosphere of understated elegance that one hardly dares breathe for fear of displacing a particle of dust. An air of suffocating sterility has seeped into the displays, which are so tastefully arranged that even the […]

Martin Creed: First Major Survey A Multi Sensory Fun Fair

Unknown, alien objects disorientate you from your very first steps: once you’ve navigated past the dog-eared sofa that curiously blocks the entrance, Work No.1092 (2011) hurtles worryingly close above your head (or for taller visitors, could well threaten decapitation). It’s exciting, but witty too – the 12-metre long neon sign , spelling ‘Mothers’, dwarfs you […]

The Dangers of Data Mining in the Art Market, etc.

The season of art market performance reports is upon us, and keeping up with them all can be an all-consuming—and sometimes baffling—affair. In the last month various entities have declared 2013 to have been both the best year ever and the second best year ever for art sales, while also (erroneously) declaring art to be […]