You do need to know some art history. As a producer of art objects/gestures, the conventions you decide to ignore and the conventions you decide to repeat are as important, if not more so, than what you invent. If you’re a total novice start with Cubism to Surrealism and then study 1945–75, then take it from […]
Gates made his name by staging soul food dinners in honour of a fictional Japanese potter. Now he is recycling the fabric of Chicago’s past, including its bricks and mortar, to transform the city’s depressed areas. In 2007 Theaster Gates held a series of soul food dinners on Chicago’s South Side to honour his mentor, […]
Seven years ago, Marlene Dumas briefly became the world’s most expensive living female artist, a dizzying upward move that was reported, somewhat breathlessly, in newspapers from New York to Tokyo (her 1995 paintingThe Visitor was sold by Sotheby’s for £3.1m; previously, her prices had stood at around the £50,000 mark). Yet her name remains, here and […]
Don’t attend the show seeking easy joys. Few are on offer in the work of the thirteen Americans, three Germans, and one Colombian—nine women and eight men—and those to be found come freighted with rankling self-consciousness or, here and there, a nonchalance that verges on contempt. The ruling insight that Hoptman proposes and the artists […]
From Anselm Kiefer’s rotting sunflowers to a rollicking super-show all over Scotland, via Rembrandt, Matisse, Andy Warhol and Egon Schiele … it was an eye-opening year. From the rusty submarines hanging in a vitrine in the courtyard to bookworks in which photographs and black paint created eerie provocative assemblages, Anselm Kiefer’s retrospective rocked me. In […]
Putting aside any petty concerns for bridges burned, here’s an incomplete list of the most despicable moments in 2014’s art world, as viewed by Scott Indrisek of Blouin Artinfo.com. From from candy factories to soggy concerts, there are two sides to every story, right?
To meet the needs of the season, a list follows below of some of the most popular stories that ran on the ARTnews website in 2014, ranging from artist profiles and investigative stories to on-the-ground art-fair coverage and breaking news. They are divided by month, and presented in no particular order. Lots here to read, to get ready for 2015.
The year hasn’t been short of blockbuster surveys and brilliantly curated displays, as well as smaller, more focused surveys that have been unjustly overlooked but which have proved quietly groundbreaking in their own way. The best exhibitions, which are not, of course, always the ones with the biggest fanfare, nor even the best loans, usually […]
The sculptor Anish Kapoor, no stranger to grandeur, has been awarded a one-man show at the Château de Versailles, reports the New York Times. The show, running from June through October 2015, will follow similar shows in the same space by Takashi Murakami, Joana Vasconcelos, and Jeff Koons. According to Catherine Pégard, director of the Château […]
PARIS –The sculptor Anish Kapoor will be the next contemporary artist to be given a one-man show at the Château de Versailles. Mr. Kapoor’s show will run from June to October next year, the palace’s chief administrator, Catherine Pégard, said in an interview. “It’s not easy to choose an artist for Versailles,” Ms. Pégard said. “It’s not […]
There are some questions in the art world that are not well received. Most of these have to do with money and rank. Asking how much an artwork costs or how important it is can seem a little crass and demeaning to the intensely personal experience of viewing high art. “The greatest picture in the […]
From the outset of his career, Puryear refused to give up what he knew and studied in order to align his work with the prevailing aesthetic. Some people believe they should do whatever it takes to fit in, while others accept that they will never fit in and do not try. There is the assimilationist […]
Quotes from Richard Serra: “Art is not democratic. It is not for the people.” “My sculptures are not objects for the viewer to stop and stare at. The historical purpose of placing sculpture on a pedestal was to establish a separation between the sculpture and the viewer. I am interested in creating a behavioral space […]
A brilliant painter derailed by an unfortunate obsession. There’s no escaping it; Hat Stand, 1969, is a beastly object. The blank-faced mannequin is too literal to succeed as a sculpture, and the conceit is too nasty to be ignored. Her position – holding up her hands to receive our hats – recalls the torture meted […]
Zoe Williams goes among the women as fetish furniture at the RA’s new show to find out. I find it very difficult to have an authentic response to work that has generated a lot of controversy in the past. My inner contrarian harasses me to disagree with the orthodoxy. So I was all set to […]
There are many sides to the work of the German artist Anselm Kiefer. Those lucky enough to visit his studio complex at Barjac in the South of France encounter a staggering array of installations, underground tunnels, and tottering concrete towers resembling some contemporary equivalent to the fortifications of medieval Tuscany. But wisely, the Royal Academy […]
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 […]
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 […]
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,” […]