Anselm Kiefer in Conversation before Kiefer’s major retrospective at the Royal Academy in London, with the new Director of the RA, Tim Marlow. This is only the third time that one artist has taken over the whole of the Royal Academy, the other two being David Hockney and Anish Kapoor – we can’t wait to […]
Irving Sandler is an artists’ art historian. In contrast to other prominent midcentury art critics—like the New York Times’s John Canaday, who warned him against fraternizing with artists for fear of impairing his critical distance—Sandler purposefully immersed himself in his subjects’ milieu, first in his days as a young reviewer for Artnews and later as […]
Seventy kilometers west of Doha lies the Brouq Nature Reserve, a sand spit in the Gulf of Bahrain where Qataris like to camp and wax nostalgic about their grandparents’ nomadic Bedouin lifestyle. To get there, you drive an hour along a highway bordered by electrical towers and plastic barriers that prevent blowing sand from drifting […]
Kiefer uses a vast panoply of materials in his art, each of which have intricate symbolic meanings. Studiously parsed, they trigger a kind of spiritual-historical giddiness. There is the straw, for instance, that symbolises the hair of the German prison guard Margarethe in Paul Celan’s poem “Death Fugue.” There are the seven flames that represent […]
This year’s Turner Prize shortlisted artists are hooked on materiality. Not some slick, seamless production-value fetishism geared for maximum visible impact, but almost the exact opposite—a thoughtful, often overly self-conscious, politically inflected take on materials and media, on production and reproduction, in which the frictionless transparency of images is jammed by the clunky inertia of […]
Robert Gober’s retrospective “The Heart Is Not A Metaphor,” which opens on October 4 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, is a strange and moving survey of domestic unease, seemingly pointless labor, and creeping horror, among other things. You enter the exhibition past a pair of very different works: “X Pipe Playpen,” […]
To say that Blenheim Palace is grand is an understatement: It’s epic. Entering the estate, with its stunning view of the open fields and humongous 18th-century mansion looming at the back, one feels like they have slipped into the opening credits of cult TV drama Downton Abbey. The Palace, built in 1704 by architect Sir […]
Has the Turner prize lost its power to shock? No – thanks to James Richards’s sphincter shots. But it’s Tris Vonna-Michell’s spellbinding spoken-word travelogues that deserve to win. What a heartening way to celebrate 30 years of the Turner prize. People are always saying the Turner, which shocked the nation with Tracey Emin’s unmade bed […]
Royal Academy, London Anselm Kiefer’s monumental work in ash, straw, diamonds and sunflowers dazzles in a superb retrospective. Only with the help of a blindfold would you be able to wander theRoyal Academy’s stupendous retrospective of his work and leave feeling anything less than drunk with amazement. However much you know about Kiefer, it’s impossible […]
The greatest of our gallery spaces are a challenge to fill, but the canvases of Anselm Kiefer, in the exhibition that opens at the Royal Academy on Saturday, make light work of it. Created with colossal labour over a period of many years in his successive huge studios – one a former silk factory in […]
There has been a lot of bickering about what Conceptual art is/was; who began it; who did what when with it; what its goals, philosophy, and politics were and might have been. I was there, but I don’t trust my memory. I don’t trust anyone else’s either. – Lucy Lippard, “Escape Attempts” The term “concept art” […]
It’s an artist’s dilemma: collectors are often more eager to buy a well-established artist’s early work than whatever he or she may be putting out now. Italian Surrealist Giorgio di Chirico famously resolved the problem in a controversial way, intentionally misdating some of his 1940s paintings because they were not nearly as sought-after as his […]
The big man of Beijing’s new show fills the former prison with a giant rainbow dragon and Lego models of 175 prisoners of conscience, from Nelson Mandela to Edward Snowden. The artist’s bravery and commitment are extraordinary. Welcome to prison, and a celebration of liberty. Ai Weiwei, the big man of Beijing, has spent years […]
Ever since critic and theorist Walter Benjamin penned his landmark essay in 1936, it’s been accepted as a kind of common wisdom that the aura of the artwork has withered in the (never-ending) age of mechanical reproduction. But a new study suggests the aura hasn’t vanished entirely yet, and perhaps it never will. “Are Artworks More Like […]
Born in Germany as the Nazis fell, Anselm Kiefer’s back catalogue is an astonishing look at the awful burden of history. Anselm Kiefer was born in Germany in 1945. A new life can rarely have started in a less promising place and time. To enter the world as the Third Reich fell was to be […]
Kiefer’s range seems limitless: the courtyard entrance to the Royal Academy will be dominated by his first ever vitrines for outdoor display, one containing ships, as it were, beached, the other with vessels afloat. The sunflowers are over for another year: the confident golden heads have drooped, their sunny countenances giving way to a black […]
Since his release from an 81-day detention by Chinese authorities in 2011, Beijing-based artist and activist Ai Weiwei has not kept silent, despite stipulations that prohibited interviews and other activities. In the United States, he was the subject of the traveling retrospective “Ai Weiwei: According to What?” which wound up its tour at the Brooklyn […]
The great German artist hits history and the Holocaust head on in works that are liberating, moving and defiantly dark. The show spans 40 years, from the scandalous series Heroic Symbols, in which he used the Nazi salute illegally, to giant works that took him over a decade to paint. Go look!
Is an exhibition ever too beautiful for its own good? Jenny Holzer’s new show at Cheim & Read, Dust Paintings, is ravishing. But the sensuality of these text-based abstractions, done in oil on linen in mostly muted colors, runs counter to their content, which is derived from declassified government reports of brutalization and death during the […]
At 69 Kiefer is widely regarded as one of the most important artists alive, or, to put it another way, a master at the alchemy of metamorphosing all manner of items into something more interesting, and sometimes much more valuable than gold: contemporary art. He is one of a succession of notable artists who emerged […]