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, […]
Having settled in at the RA, Marlow is about to launch his first major exhibition: the work of Ai Weiwei, the Chinese dissident artist who was imprisoned without charge in 2011 and released on condition that he should give up his passport. A thorn in the Chinese government’s side for two decades, he has made […]
Many exhibitions are good, some are great and a very few are tantamount to works of art in their own right — for their clarity, lyricism and accumulative wisdom. The Museum of Modern Art’s staggering “Picasso Sculpture” is in the third category. Large, ambitious and unavoidably, dizzyingly peripatetic, this is a once-in-a-lifetime event. It sustains […]
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 […]
Trevor Paglen has tracked secret spy satellites, photographed so-called “black sites” like Area 51, cataloged hundreds of classified codes for military operations and their associated (and often bizarre) patches, and blasted images into space for the benefit of future civilizations or a visiting alien species. With a Ph.D. in experimental geography (it’s more than just […]
From his earliest performances and actions in the 1960s involving animal remains through his infamous multi-day, multimedia festivals staged at an Austrian castle, Hermann Nitsch has remained a figure of boldness and controversy. Earlier this year a major show at Museo Jumex in Mexico City wascancelled — but no such fate has befallen the artist’s […]
Public art often gets scarred by battles over its meaning or right to exist, but the vandals who daubed antisemitic graffiti on his sculpture are idiots who picked the wrong target. Anish Kapoor, it turns out, is not only a brilliant artist but a brave one. Faced with an antisemitic attack on his open-air sculpture […]
“It’s very important not to trust yourself” says Martin Creed in this interview on the occasion of the opening reception of his solo exhibition at Hauser & Wirth Gallery in Zürich. The show features works made in wood, plastic, neon, wool, canvas and carpet tiles. On the opening night, several performances were shown. In addition […]
Sculpture officially called ‘Dirty Corner’, in Palace of Versailles gardens, was attacked in June then cleaned but this time graffiti will stay ‘to bear witness’. A controversial sculpture by artist Anish Kapoor, on display in the gardens of the Palace of Versailles – and informally dubbed the “queen’s vagina” – was vandalised again on Sunday, […]
LONDON — The art market is a notoriously opaque business. And over the past couple of years the highly speculative trade in emerging artists has given off plenty of heat. In 2014, recently made works by young abstract painters like Oscar Murillo, Lucien Smith, Alex Israel, Mark Flood and Christian Rosa were being “flipped” at […]
James Turrell’s work is as instantly recognizable as it is undefinable, existing somewhere between land art, light art, sculpture, and installation. Turrell has been exploring the nature of light and space since the 1960s, and in that time has created works all over the world from Yucatan to Japan, not to mention his yet-unfinished opus […]
At 77 years old, Daniel Buren has lost none of his disruptive streak and continues to talk frankly. Throughout his career, Buren has challenged the viewer’s concept of space with his in-situ works. In 1971, in the Guggenheim Museum, he controversially installed a 66 x 32 ft. canvas banner with his signature vertical stripes, which […]
Conceived as an artistic wormhole connecting New York and Istanbul,Protocinema is the highly unconventional brainchild of the equally unconventional curator Mari Spirito, a former 303 Gallery dealer who in 2011 decided to parlay her voluminous Rolodex of art connections into the kind of free-floating, no-holds-barred platform that artists dream of. Now nearing its fifth anniversary, the […]
Bruce Nauman is considered a towering and influential figure in postwar American art. His reputation as a master of minimalist and conceptual art was cemented more than four decades ago when he was first showing with Leo Castelli in New York and in important European shows like “When Attitudes Become Form,” at the Kunsthalle Bern […]
LONDON — The international art market is gearing up for a hectic autumn of auctions and fairs. Trading conditions could be challenging. Shanghai’s Composite Index of Shares has lost more than 35 percent of its value since June, destabilizing stock markets across the world. Slowing growth in China has depressed oil and commodity prices, tipping […]
LOS ANGELES – Eli Broad is a man with a reputation for getting things done. After building two Fortune 500 companies from the ground up, he transferred his drive to philanthropy about fifteen years ago; his achievements have since included almost single-handedly creating a cultural centre for downtown Los Angeles, including its monumental anchor – the Frank […]
Our living ladies span four continents, with work that at times reflects the diversity of their geographical profiles. Using data drawn from the artnet Price Database over the past ten years, there are some shifts from our previous report. Three newcomers join the list, two are no longer on it, and Cady Noland still holds […]
Though he has produced pottery and paintings, sculptures, music and video works, Theaster Gates is best known, as we put it in our new monograph, for projects that “bridge the gap between art and life and encourage change by reaching beyond a traditional art audience.” He saved remnants of derelict churches, created black-tar paintings in […]
Marc Quinn’s last London show, five years ago, featured figurative sculptures of defiantly non-Classical subjects including pregnant men, women with penises and a lady called Chelsea Charms who apparently has the dubious honor of possessing the largest breasts on planet earth (although the fickle nature of this kind of fame means she may no longer […]
In a 1967 Artforum article titled “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art,” the artist Sol LeWitt gave a simple definition for what would soon become one of the crucial facets of contemporary art in the 20th century and beyond. “In conceptual art,” he writes, “the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work….The idea […]