Mention Joseph Beuys’ name and the usual iconic gestures come to mind — the objects made from felt and fat; the scribbled-out drawings; the pioneering performances of “How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare” (1965) and “I Like America and America Likes Me” (1974) — all of which have borne a profound influence on […]
These days, when we hear an artist want to change the world, we’re often a little skeptical. Yet for the German sculptor, painter, draughtsman, teacher, theorist and political activist, Joseph Beuys (1921 – 1986), his artistic ambition was almost indivisible from a more concrete ambition to remake society for the better. “Along with protests against the threat […]
Violent and sexual precursor to performance art is dramatically laid bare in new exhibition. Brus and his fellow Actionists, Otto Muhl, Hermann Nitsch and Rudolf Schwarzkogler, have been explained away as the upshot of Austria’s failure to come to terms with Nazism, as an extreme manifestation of the sexual revolution, a logical extension of action […]
More so than Post-Impressionism or Post-Modernism, the genre of art known as Post-Minimalism is a particularly squirrely one to wrap one’s mind around—after all, what is there beyond Minimalism’s elegant reduction of art to pure form? The critic Roberta Smith may have put it best a few years ago when she described it as “that unruly early ’70s mix of Conceptual,Process, […]
Silly, serious and a sensory delight. Work from the artist who won the Turner Prize turning the lights off and on. If you’re suffering from the January blues, hurry to the Southbank Centre where Martin Creed’s exhibition is bound to make you smile. The man best known for winning the Turner Prize in 2001 by […]
For those unaware of Serra’s oeuvre, he’s made a name for himself by creating building-sized metal sculptures that often make you feel a little unbalanced when you’re next to them. He makes Art with a capital A, and most of us art folk are taught in our earliest art-school days that his sculptures evoke awe. […]
Whiteread’s approach to sculpture is predicated on the translation of negative space into solid form. Casting from everyday objects, or from spaces around or within furniture and architecture, she uses materials such as rubber, dental plaster and resin to record every nuance. The reason my work has affected people over the years is because it […]
The Hayward’s Martin Creed show is more like a glorious tour of his mind. Adrian Searle has the time of his life squeezing through balloons, ducking a steel beam – and watching an endless erection. The variety of Creed’s work makes it hard to talk about touch, manner or voice. But they’re there all the […]
Grayson Perry, the Turner Prize winning artist has collected his CBE from Prince Charles in a ceremony at Buckingham Palace. Dressing as his alter-ego character Claire, Grayson wore a ‘Mother of the Bride’ midnight blue dress and jacket, heels, and an over-the-top Camilla style black hat complete with ostrich feathers. The Queen’s official spokesman commented; […]
Like seeing double: the Amsterdam and the National Gallery Sunflowers hang side by side for the first time in 65 years at London’s National Gallery. What would be the ultimate blockbuster exhibition? High up anyone’s list would surely be a show of the still lifes of sunflowers that Vincent Van Gogh painted in Provence between 1888 […]
When Creed opens a retrospective at London’s Hayward Gallery on Wednesday it will be the latest chapter in one of contemporary art’s most glittering careers. It’s hard to believe he was once such a nobody that when this unknown artist sent Work No 88, A sheet of A4 paper crumpled into a ball, to Nicholas […]
The artist Jonathan Monk makes work that casts an arch eye on art history, his fellow artists, and the transition of a work from the studio to the gallery to the collector’s wall or museum. In other words, his target is art and the entire artistic process, which he lampoons with wry humor and an unabashed use […]
Carrie Mae Weems Charts the Black Experience in Photographs Color and class are still the great divides in American culture, and few artists have surveyed them as subtly and incisively as Carrie Mae Weems, whose traveling 30-year retrospective has arrived at the Guggenheim Museum. From its early candid family photographs, through series of pictures that […]
In 2007, Peter Doig went from being a painter quietly admired by collectors and curators to an art-world colossus when his work White Canoe—created 16 years earlier—was auctioned for a record-breaking $11.3 million. Soon after, both Scots and Canadians claimed the Edinburgh-born, Toronto- and Montreal-raised artist as their own—an impetus for the remarkable show No Foreign Lands, […]
Any sense of real subversion or originality Emin ever conveyed has long since been packaged, copyrighted, and reproduced as kitsch self-caricature. An interview in the latest issue of Time Out reads like a cut-and-paste summary of previous public statements: Emin’s views on life boiled down to bullet points: • She is oppressed as a woman artist. […]
For a film that opened with Ai Weiwei’s statement, “Without freedom of speech, there is no modern world, just a barbaric one,” there was an irony in the fact that Andreas Johnsen’s Big Brother Watching Me… started practically without words. When the artist was freed in June 2011 following 80 days in prison, one of the conditions […]
At 54, Doig is one of the most talked-about and praised artists in the world, his work housed in many prestigious public and private collections. Last year two Doigs, both painted in the 1990s, sold at auction in London for, respectively, $10.5-million and $12-million. Montreal currently has bragging rights as the sole North American venue […]
When John Baldessari started creating his text paintings in the mid 1960s, only a handful of artists had ever trifled with the idea. For one of his early text paintings, Baldessari chose a simple phrase that offered a perfect example of the layered meanings his work is often able to express with extremely limited means: “Pure Beauty.”
From the 17th-century painter who repeatedly depicted a woman beheading a man to the last great surrealist, Louise Bourgeois, here are 10 women artists who took on the patriarchy and won.
Richard Serra at the Gagosian Gallery. Heavy metal. At the end of December, the PBS host Charlie Rose conducted a curious interview with Richard Serra about his new show in two locations of the Gagosian Gallery in New York, and it quickly became popular on the Internet. The conversation was notable mostly because it reached […]