Artists the world over were instantly captivated three years ago when UK-based Surrey NanoSystems announced the invention of Vantablack, the darkest material ever made. And things continue to get darker: The company has been advancing the technology, and released some astonishing photographs and footage of the pigment in action, which have to be seen to be […]
Withth two kilometres’ worth of white neon tubing arranged in dazzling arrays of lines and curves high above the Duveen Galleries’ polished floors, Forms in Space… by Light (in Time), Cerith Wyn Evans’s installation for this year’s Tate Britain Commission (of which Sotheby’s is a sponsor) cannot be mistaken for another artist’s work. Born in […]
An Art-Documentary Film About Duchamp’s Ideas and Artworks (1963). Watch the Video and turn up the sound.
The Welsh artist unveils 2km of neon suspended in mid-air – and it’s an adventure playground for the eyes. It all begins with a white neon O, hanging above our heads like the shape the lips make before an exclamation. Or a spyglass aimed at the chaos beyond. Suspended partway down the long Duveen Gallery […]
The Conceptual art movement is probably the most radical and the most controversial plane in modern and contemporary art. Some artists, experts and art historians even dismiss it as art. Conceptual art is based on the notion that the essence of art is an idea, or concept, and may exist distinct from and in the […]
Revisiting the irony of the original Dada movement, Neo-Dada was first popularized in the early 1960s. The label has been applied to a wide variety of artistic works, mostly including Junk art, use of found objects and the employment of banal activities and objects as instruments of social and aesthetic critique. The most popular names […]
The art movement known as Dada, or Dadaism, has undoubtedly shifted the course of artistic history on multiple fields. Uniting the European avant-garde in the early 20th century, the movement was officially created in Zürich, Switzerland, in 1916 at CabaretVoltaire, and it celebrates 100 years of existence this year. Nurturing many monumental artists and their […]
Can One Make Works That Are Not “Works” of Art? This was a question asked by Duchamp in his notes from 1913, and remains being the essential question while considering the Richard Mutt Case. Exactly one hundred years ago, in 1917, the course of art history has been completely changed by a submission of a urinal […]
Presuming that calls for censorship and destruction constitute a legitimate response to perceived injustice leads us down a very dark path. The presence of blackness in a Whitney Biennial invariably stirs controversy — it’s deemed to be unfit or not enough, or too much. The current Whitney Biennial is no exception — the art press […]
We all encounter art we don’t like, that upsets and infuriates us. This doesn’t deserve to be exhibited, our brains yell; it should not be allowed to exist. Still, does such aversion mean that an artwork must be removed from view — or, worse, destroyed? This question has been at the heart of the controversy […]
Once a key part of a generation of artists who transformed east London, the sculptor talks to Eva Wiseman about doll’s houses, her fellow YBAs, and why she left Shoreditch. It’s 24 years since Whiteread, then 30, cast the last remaining property in a demolished terrace in Bow, east London, in liquid concrete, sparking debates […]
Works by Scottish poet Ian Hamilton Finlay and Brazilian poet Augusto de Campos have joined the Getty’s collection and will go on view in an exhibition opening next week. Tug, fug, chug, glug — such are the rhyming words used by the writer and artist Ian Hamilton Finlay in “Poem with 3 Stripes,” one of his […]
Before his death this month, Howard Hodgkin was preparing the first ever exhibition devoted to his portraits. Paul Levy recalls the man who cared much more about his family and friends than being part of any movement. Howard Hodgkin: Absent Friends, an exhibition of the painter’s portraits, opens at the National Portrait Gallery on 23 […]
During his long, illustrious career, Robert Morris has constructed sculptures that startle, question, challenge and flout expectations. Since the early 1960s, he has made, in a range of materials, spare, geometric forms; Dada-like objects; ephemeral works; land art; environments with sound systems that play scripted narratives; proto-selfies; dramatic pastel pictures with elaborate sculpted frames; performance […]
Through around 60 historical and contemporary objects, Lunar Attraction at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem considers the enduring artistic curiosity for the mysteries of the moon. SALEM, Mass. — As demonstrated by the metal cosmic forms on the 3,600-year-old Nebra Sky Disk, unearthed in Germany in 1999, humans have been visually reacting to the moon for an […]
Born in Birmingham, Alabama, Kerry James Marshall taught himself to draw and made his first paintings in Harlem YMCA. As a major retrospective opens in LA, he talks about taking on the Old Masters. The day before the crowds get in to his critically praised retrospective, Kerry James Marshall is walking around the Museum of […]
Turner Prize winner Sir Howard Hodgkin, considered among Britain’s finest contemporary artists, saw his paintings as distilled memories and created abstract evocations of emotion with potent, compelling use of colour. Sir Howard Hodgkin, who has died aged 84, was something of a rebel, though anyone meeting him for the first time would not readily have guessed […]
In 1884, Georges Seurat strategically placed dots atop a canvas, leading people to believe they were looking at an image of park-goers lounging along the Seine River in France. The technique was known as pointillism, and it seemed new at the time. But 38,000 years ago, people living inside caves in southwest France were doing […]