The week leading up to the press preview for the 8th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art marked a change of seasons. (Disclosure: Biennale curator Juan Gaitan is a friend, and participating artist Judy Radul is my partner.) Gone were the cold winds and grey skies of winter; in their place, golden mornings, tawny afternoons and […]
NEW YORK, NY.- The Whitney Museum of American Art will debut the most comprehensive retrospective ever devoted to the groundbreaking art of Jeff Koons. This unprecedented exhibition will be the artist’s first large-scale museum presentation in New York and also the first time that a single artist’s work will fill nearly the entire Whitney Museum. […]
Showing the Austrian maverick at the temple to Britain’s greatest female sculptor reveals what a complex and joyous artist he was. If you stand among Barbara Hepworth‘s carved and rounded plaster and wood shapes at the Hepworth in Wakefield for long enough, you feel that time will wear a hole right through you. Hepworth’s art seemed to aim […]
Duchamp’s influence is in evidence at the fair, but can today’s artists reimagine his idea? One hundred years after Marcel Duchamp invented the readymade, his influence reverberates around Art Basel. Overt references include the late Elaine Sturtevant’s Duchamp Porte Bouteilles, 1993, suspended from the ceiling at Galerie Hans Mayer (2.0/E8). The work, which sold to […]
“What do you think about the future?,” Hans Ulrich Obrist asks French painterPierre Soulages in the catalogue for his current double exhibition at Dominique Lévy and Emmanuel Perrotin galleries. “It doesn’t belong to me,” he answers. That’s an astute assessment of the work, even if it is also part of the stubborn charm of his black paintings.
For the past 150 years, pretty consistently, art movements moved in thrilling but unmysterious ways. They’d build on the inventions of several extraordinary artists or constellations of artists, gain followings, become what we call a movement or a school, influence everything around them, and then become diluted as they were taken up by more and […]
Douglas Coupland opens his new exhibit at the VAG. Douglas Coupland opens his new exhibit at the VAG. The Vancouver Art Gallery presents Douglas Coupland: everywhere is anywhere is anything is everything from May 31 to Sept. 1.
Douglas Coupland’s new exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery crackles with creativity, invention and insight. Coupland’s work in “everywhere is anywhere is anything is everything” combines an incredible pop art sensibility that delights in combining colour, shape and form with a surprising and subtle mix of ideas. In the first major survey of his work […]
Douglas Coupland has been collecting the stuff for years: toy guns, adding machines, little astronaut figures, tiny cribs and toilets, a giant molar, a punching bag. They came from Craigslist, dumpsters, garage sales, eBay. Now gathered in an enormous installation – white items on white shelves; colourful trinkets on black shelves; a precarious Tower of […]
Forget the bloody martyrdoms and hot pincers … Viola’s glorious new video installation is a hi-tech Caravaggio that redefines religious art. Bill Viola has created a powerful modern altarpiece for St Paul’s Cathedral that perfectly suits the restrained spirituality of this most English of churches. Coming into Christopher Wren’s great building on a weekday morning when crowded buses […]
WAKEFIELD.- Yorkshire Sculpture Park announces an exhibition by Ai Weiwei, opening in the Park’s newly refurbished 18th century chapel following a £500,000 restoration. The project, the first by Ai Weiwei in a British public gallery since Sunflower Seeds at Tate Modern in 2010, is accompanied by poetry readings from the works of celebrated poet Ai […]
Two exhibitions of new work by the Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei have opened in the UK. The first at a public art gallery in Yorkshire (Yorkshire Sculpture Park (YSP) is his first in a British public gallery since Sunflower Seeds at Tate Modern in 2010. iron tree, 2013 is a majestic six-metre high sculpture […]
Yorkshire Sculpture Park has a strange new tree. Solid yet graceful, inspired by the street vendors of Jingdezhen in southern China, who sell wood for its beauty, “Iron Tree” (2013) is a collection of fragments held together with bolts. It seems to have been in the wars, this tree, much like its maker Ai Weiwei. […]
The row around Marina Abramović is redundant, as the story of art is one of homages and remakes. But that’s not to say there isn’t a problem. “Good artists copy, great artists steal,” said Pablo Picasso. Or at least he gets the credit for saying it. Perhaps he pinched the words from Oscar Wilde. For there […]
Pistoletto shook up the 60s with his arte povera revolution. What’s the legendary mirror-smasher doing now? Designing houses made of rice at his eco HQ. Born in Biella in 1933, Pistoletto grew up under fascism. “You had to believe – in God and in Mussolini. I felt there was a terrible contradiction in believing in a […]
Ai Weiwei’s activism and his 2011 detention by the Chinese state have made him one of the world’s best-known artists but can you picture his work? Google him, and his portrait, not his art, dominates the images that appear. This is a useful reminder that he’s a top conceptual artist, with a knack for finding […]
From the suggestive to the precarious, a new exhibition casts the humble chair in a new light, writes Louisa Buck. Q: When is a chair more than just a chair? A: When it is an artist’s chair. It is a truth, universally acknowledged, that sculpture can be experienced as much by the body as in […]
Carl Andre is one of America’s greatest living sculptors. He has been mostly absent from the American art scene for decades, but recently returned to oversee the installation of a new retrospective. Watch the video.
A year away from opening, the new home of the Whitney Museum of American Art is still a construction site, but it is already a vivid presence in Manhattan’s meatpacking district, and curators have mapped out months’ worth of exhibitions there. The first show to go on view next spring — an opening date has […]
Two Shows Offer a New Look at Julian Schnabel. At the moment, Julian Schnabel’s painting seems to be the art that dares not speak its name. Its influence is widely visible but rarely cited. You can see it in the work of artists from Joe Bradley to Oscar Murillo and all sorts of painters who […]