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 […]
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 […]
SAN FRANCISCO — Judging from the large bags of colorful Legos on the floor and dozens of plastic base plates piled on tables, this room could have been the activities station for a well-funded summer camp. And the five women and men drifting in and out, slicing open boxes and rooting around for the right […]
Steampunk shipping containers, planes full of sunflowers and triptychs the size of squash courts – Michael Prodger visits the place that’s produced some of the most extraordinary artworks of the last century. Anselm Kiefer is a bewildering artist to get to grips with. The word that comes up most often when his work is discussed is […]
Wouldn’t it be nice to think that a gender-delimited list is no longer relevant? It’s true that to be a practicing woman artist today is hardly the struggle it would have been in Mary Cassatt’s era. Women artists are actively acquired by museums and honored with major surveys and retrospectives; recent names in the spotlight […]
A holdover from the days of the French salon system, art awards provide distinguished organizations—museums, government bodies, corporations, philanthropic groups—with a way to honor the outstanding artistic talent of the day (and to burnish their own reputations in the process). With Grand Rapids’s headline-grabbing Artprize on the horizon, we’ve assembled a glossary of the world’s […]
Prior to the Royal Academy’s show, we look at one key work by the great German painter. No one, beyond the Royal Academy’s curatorial team, knows exactly what’s going on display at next month’s Anselm Kiefer exhibition, yet it is already being described as a blockbuster. The RA is devoting all of its galleries to the […]
When John Baldessari started creating his text paintings in the mid 1960s, only a handful of artists had ever trifled with the idea. There were Roy Lichtenstein‘s paintings from comics, and the Cubists had integrated newspaper clippings in their work, but nobody had been brave enough to exhibit paintings that simply offered text. For one […]
The artist Ai Weiwei, confined to his house and studio in Beijing, his passport confiscated by the state, has been roaming the corridors and state rooms of Blenheim Palace, one of the grandest houses in England, through a 3D computer model. He has never set foot in the gigantic home of the Duke of Marlborough, but is […]
Protesters swarmed the Fesch Museum in Ajaccio, Corsica on Tuesday and Wednesday, demanding that it remove Andres Serrano’s ever-incendiary work Piss Christ (1987). As Le Figaro reported, approximately 50 people stood outside the museum holding a large sign which read “PISS CHRIST FORA,” or “Piss Christ out.” The protesters contend that the work is an affront to Catholicism and an “insult to every Corsican,” the […]