In 1968, Carolee Schneemann caused outrage in Britain simply by giving a talk about art. “I wore farmers overalls,” she says, “and I had lots of oranges stuffed everywhere. It was about Cézanne, so I showed slides and talked about his influence – and I kept undressing and dressing. I was naked under my overalls […]
At the Gagosian Gallery in King’s Cross, one Hans-Georg Bruno Kern, who changed his name to Baselitz after the Saxon village of Deutschbaselitz where he was born in 1938, also presents Farewell Bill, a suite of impressively large and loose self-portraits in honour of the great Abstract Expressionist painter Willem de Kooning. If Baselitz is […]
Indomitable. That’s how Brad Pitt described Steve McQueen during the Oscars Ceremony last night, when 12 Years a Slave—the harrowing story of a man sold into slavery, co-produced by Pitt and directed by McQueen—won Best Picture award. McQueen is no doubt a film force to be reckoned with, embraced and feted by Hollywood. And it’s within […]
When a local artist intentionally shattered a vase, last week, at the Pérez Art Museum Miami’s ongoing Ai Weiwei retrospective, most journalists predictably focussed on the price of the destroyed work, which was said to be a million dollars. CNN’sheadline was typical of the coverage: “MIAMI ARTIST DESTROYS $1 MILLION AI WEIWEI VASE IN PROTEST.” Variations […]
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WASHINGTON, DC.- Santiago Sierra (Spanish, b. Madrid, 1966; lives and works in Madrid) and Jorge Galindo (Spanish, b. Madrid, 1965; lives and works in London) organized an unusual motorcade along one of the most prestigious thoroughfares in the Spanish capital in August 2012. Seven black Mercedes-Benz sedans made their way down the Gran Vía, each […]
It is what it was, and what it has become. Where would we be without it?
The Britannia Street Gagosian gallery is currently showing the works of Georg Baselitz in Farewell Bill. The new Baselitz paintings are self-portraits that pay reverence to the great artist Willem de Kooning. Baselitz encountered Kooning’s gestural paintings, Woman I and Woman II, as a student in Germany in 1958. A traditional portrait depicts a realistic […]
The American Conceptualist Dan Graham has long worn many art world hats. He has produced films and videos, drawings and prints; chronicled rock culture; and collaborated with bands like Sonic Youth and Japanther. But Mr. Graham is perhaps best known for his architectural environments and glass pavilions, which he has been designing since the 1980s. […]
When Martin Creed was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 2001, it showed him something about himself that he’d rather not have seen. “What I hated was finding out how much I wanted to win,” he says. “Prizes are stupid but God, I was a desperate man!” It’s an uncharacteristic admission in some ways—Creed casts […]
Television presenter and writer Dawn O’Porter takes us on a whistle-stop tour of nudity in art, from its origins 25,000 years ago to the present day With an unflinching gaze, O’Porter tackles the ever-changing rules of acceptability for representing and beholding flesh in art. Watch the Video!
Famously inspired by a car crash, Futurism burst forth in 1909 with an uncompromising agenda. Its poetics, as decreed by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti in his manifesto, would be “courage, audacity and revolt” nurtured by “fire, hatred, and speed.” Museums had become “cemeteries,” Marinetti wrote, and should be demolished, along with libraries, to deliver Italy from the […]
Million dollar Ai Weiwei vase smashed. Mr Ai Weiwei said he did not support artists destroying other artists’ work. An American artist has been arrested after smashing a million dollar vase painte. A vandal was arrested after breaking a million-dollar vase at the Perez Art Museum Miami (PAMM). According to the Miami Police report, a […]
British adventure photographer Lucinda Grange has travelled the world, scaling famous buildings and structures and taking pictures from the top. Among her impressive list of climbs is the Great Pyramid of Giza, Firth of Forth Rail Bridge in Scotland and the Manhattan and Brooklyn bridges.
Did American painting exist before Abstract Expressionism? Not such a daft question if we don’t get to see any of it. Many will still argue that American painting before mid-century, with just a few exceptions, is really too derivative, too backward-looking to get excited about, and that it was photography that American artists really excelled […]
From his sculpture of a Hitler salute to his comments on women artists, Georg Baselitz has always been a provocative figure. After 50 years exploring the state of Germany, he tells Nicholas Wroe why he turned to America for his new show. In 1958 Georg Baselitz, then a 20-year-old art student recently arrived in West Berlin […]
Gagosian will exhibit his self-portraits, British Museum has his prints and Royal Academy presents woodcuts from his collection. London is having a Georg Baselitz moment, with three exhibitions showing different aspects of the German artist’s work and passions opening within five weeks. Baselitz was in London on Thursday for an exhibition of new self-portraits at […]
The dirty alchemy of photographer Roger Ballen in combination with frenetic rap-ravers Die Antwoord resulted in the video for “I Fink U Freeky” in 2012. Now a monograph distills the mix of the South African collaborators to its elements. Roger Ballen / Die Antwoord: I Fink You Freeky, published by Prestel in the fall, cuts […]
David Shrigley admits it’s ridiculous to claim that a 10-metre-high thumbs up in Trafalgar Square will improve society, the economy and the weather – but he has to believe it. “As an artist you have to feel your art makes the world a better place and you have to believe that quite sincerely, otherwise why […]
Richard Hamilton was an artist whose considerable ambition was to “get all of living” into his work. In his epoch-making collage of 1956,Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing?,the living space is crowded with up-to‑the-minute objects of desire: the TV set, the vacuum cleaner, the tinned ham, the tape recorder, the body builder’s muscles, the cone-shape […]