Damien Hirst, Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable, review: this spectacular failure could be the shipwreck of his career

After months of speculation, rumour, and stage-managed hype, Damien Hirst’s latest extravaganza is finally opening in Venice – and, my goodness, it’s enormous. With 190 works of art, displayed across 54,000 square feet of gallery space, Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable, as the exhibition is called, is arranged across two venues: Palazzo Grassi, […]

Who’s Afraid of Conceptual Art?

Dr James Fox has never really got conceptual art. And he’s not alone. Conceptual art has been treated with suspicion and incredulity by virtually everyone outside the art world for nearly a hundred years. Ever since Marcel Duchamp first displayed a signed urinal and claimed it was art in 1917.  So was he taking the […]

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 […]

Edge of the Seat: The Artist’s Chair

From the suggestive to the precarious, a new exhibition casts the humble chair in a new light, writes Louisa Buck. Q: When is a chair more than just a chair? A: When it is an artist’s chair. It is a truth, universally acknowledged, that sculpture can be experienced as much by the body as in […]

Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, review: ‘a terrific treat on a winter’s morning’

Like seeing double: the Amsterdam and the National Gallery Sunflowers hang side by side for the first time in 65 years at London’s National Gallery. What would be the ultimate blockbuster exhibition? High up anyone’s list would surely be a show of the still lifes of sunflowers that Vincent Van Gogh painted in Provence between 1888 […]

Peter Doig: No Foreign Lands, Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh

Billed as a homecoming, the first Edinburgh retrospective for the painter Peter Doig lingers in the imagination, says Alastair Sooke. With the exception of Gauguin, the French stockbroker who plunged into Tahiti with whom Doig is frequently compared, there are few artists it makes less sense to consider through the filter of their national identity. […]