Monstrous as the Wall was, it offered artists like Noir – and musicians like Bowie – a dark subject matter that is lacking in safe consumerist societies. Has culture ever recovered from the fall of the Berlin Wall? Seriously. The division of Berlin and state surveillance endured by people trapped in the eastern half of the […]
A joyous celebration of ad hoc creativity fills the Duveen Galleries. The revamping of Tate Britain has produced such an atmosphere of understated elegance that one hardly dares breathe for fear of displacing a particle of dust. An air of suffocating sterility has seeped into the displays, which are so tastefully arranged that even the […]
We always knew Ai Weiwei was a fan of Marcel Duchamp. The Chinese artist’s massive bicycle sculptures made reference to both a mode of transport commonly associated with Chinese peasantry, and also Duchamp’s first readymade,Bicycle Wheel (1913), consisting of the front forks and wheel of a bike fitted into a wooden stool. Now the Chinese artist has drawn […]
Unknown, alien objects disorientate you from your very first steps: once you’ve navigated past the dog-eared sofa that curiously blocks the entrance, Work No.1092 (2011) hurtles worryingly close above your head (or for taller visitors, could well threaten decapitation). It’s exciting, but witty too – the 12-metre long neon sign , spelling ‘Mothers’, dwarfs you […]
He’s one of Britain’s greatest painters – and he rarely flings open his studio doors. David Levene swooshes in to glimpse the great man at work. Take a look!
He may be in his 80s and in need of a wheelchair to get about, but Howard Hodgkin still paints with staggering power. Jonathan Jones meets a ‘living master’. Howard Hodgkin sits in a wheelchair in his studio. Light falls through the glass roof on to big boards propped against white-washed brick walls. One by one, […]
Check out the video of cutting edge Animatronics by Jordan Wolfson at David Zwirner Gallery, NYC. No, we really mean it – check it out and watch the Video, and enlarge it!
In spite of countless false starts and snowy regressions, it is technically spring in New York now (really!), and it is therefore open season for public art. The city’s parks are quickly filling with public art as outdoor exhibitions open in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens. From a reclining giant in Queens and a deconstructed duplicate […]
One great rock duo – the Kills’ Alison Mosshart and Jamie Hince – explore the greatest duos in art. Featuring double-acts such as Gilbert and George, Jake and Dinos Chapman, Marina Abramovic and Ulay, and Lucian Freud and Leigh Bowery, they examine this most intense bond as part of the Tate Unlock Art series. Watch […]
Photographer Nan Goldin burst on to the art scene in 1986 with The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, hugely influential images that chronicled the druggy New York demi-monde she and her friends inhabited. Now 60, her latest work is all about children. So has the queen of hardcore photography finally mellowed?
By 1991, Mike Kelley had emerged as a crucial artist in Los Angeles, at the head of a pack that had pushed into prominence in the previous decade. His riveting sculptures reassembled from ratty stuffed animals, crocheted dolls and other tattered children’s playthings that he scavenged from thrift shops were also generating considerable critical attention […]
From mysterious 30,000-year-old cave paintings to a ‘cathedral of the mind’ by Jackson Pollock, art critic Jonathan Jonesnames his favourite artworks of all time – and where in the world you can see them. What would make your top 10?
In laying bare his first pieces, the British painter reveals how he bubbled over with excitement in his student days – and teaches a valuable lesson in how artists can find their signature style. It takes a special kind of courage for a famous artist to drag 40-year-old apprentice pieces out of the attic and […]
The late German artist Sigmar Polke was not the type to make things easy for anyone. After trying to interview him in Los Angeles in 1995, reporter Kristine McKenna wrote that she felt like Margaret Dumont “trying to get a straight answer out of the Marx Brothers.” That same year, British critic Adrian Searle showed up at Polke’s […]
LONDON — Before a standing-room crowd at Christie’s here last month, the bidding opened on an abstract painting filled with black scratching, “Burrito” scrawled across the top in bright yellow. The auctioneer announced that there were already 17 telephone and absentee buyers vying for the canvas, made three years ago by Oscar Murillo, who just […]
Yuxweluptun’s abstract paintings can seem off-kilter with his figurative works but, in fact, they share features. Dubbed “Ovoidism” by Yuxweluptun, the works employ the figure of the ovoid, although here, it is the sole graphic element. He also uses a more limited palette in the abstracts and, unlike the smooth surfaces of the landscapes, the […]
Yoko Ono (B. 1933, Tokyo) has been recognized as one of the most outstanding avant-garde artists for over sixty years. She is a pioneer in many of the artistic fields to which she has dedicated her life, and is considered to be one of the precursors to conceptual art, film and performance art. She is […]
Bilbao exhibition of installations, music and films demonstrates avant-gardiste’s true talents, her reach and influence. ‘The ladder John had to climb up was very high,” recalls Yoko Ono as we chat about one of her most famous works. It is called Ceiling Painting or Yes Painting, and it is one of the classics of conceptual art that […]
2017 will mark the 100th anniversary of the day Marcel Duchamp walked into the Society of Independent Artists lugging a porcelain urinal he had purchased at 5th Avenue’s J. L. Mott Iron Works and submitted it as a “readymade” sculpture. Duchamp’s radical and audacious gesture was met, at the time, with shock and indignation—it was literally hidden away behind a screen during the […]
Georg Baselitz, the veteran German artist who likes to bait, provoke and raise hackles, most recently with an interview in Der Spiegel in which he said women artists couldn’t paint (he mentioned the few exceptions, which was generous of him), is enjoying a triple billing in London. His new paintings at the Gagosian Gallery adopt the Abstract […]