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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
With Cameras Optional, New Directions in Photography At first glance, viewers of “What Is a Photograph?” opening on Jan. 31 at the International Center of Photography, will not even recognize the work on the wall as photographic. There is no easily identifiable subject, no clear representational form. “The show does not answer the question,” said […]
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 […]
At least two guiding spirits hover around To Leave a Light Impression, the new show by British artist Darren Almond at White Cube, Bermondsey. The most obvious is Charles Darwin, in whose footsteps Almond followed to make several of his images. The other is the lesser-known Scottish nature writer, Nan Shepherd, whose book, The Living Mountain, provides the […]
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, […]
There couldn’t be a better exhibition to inaugurate the new Perez Art Museum Miami than the traveling solo retrospective from the famous Chinese artist Ai Weiwei. Like the museum, Ai Weiwei: According To What? is monumental — physically huge, with a lot to say, and important for Miami. Contemporary Chinese art has been a hot commodity for […]
William Burroughs’s photographs offer real insight into his written work. Lynch’s and Warhol’s images pale by comparison. “A picture just means I know where I was every minute,” Andy Warholonce said. “That’s why I take pictures. It’s a visual diary.” In this instinct, Warhol was, as always, ahead of the game. One senses that he would […]
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 […]
Robert Duncan and Jess, and Their Wonderland of Art If you were young, gifted and odd, San Francisco was a good place to be in the years after World War II, when big changes were brewing in American art and culture. And that city is the setting for “An Opening of the Field: Jess, Robert […]
They love, love, love Isa Genzken over at the Museum of Modern Art, where the artist’s first major American museum survey remains on view through March 10, before traveling to museums in Chicago and Dallas. The 65-year-old Berlin-based German sculptor, whose 150 works fill 10 open-plan galleries on the museum’s sixth floor, is “one of the most important artists […]
Two years ago, when the late Ileana Sonnabend’s family donated Robert Rauschenberg’s famous artwork Canyon (1959) to the Museum of Modern Art, a condition of the gift was that the museum put on a show about the legendary art dealer, who died in 2007. Curator Ann Temkin has now fulfilled that promise, …
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.”
Kelley’s cynicism, deftness with appropriation, and oddball subversiveness is introduced immediately in the exhibition space. “Entry Way (Genealogical Chart)” (1995) is a wall-mounted sculpture loaded with iconic symbols and logos one might find upon entering a small town in America—Kiwanis Club, 4-H, Masonic Lodge, Goodwill.
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 […]
Mirrors can invert, distort, reveal and register experiences. Sculptor Anish Kapoor’s reflective work Non-Object (Pole) (2008) refracts a spectacular view of the Anatolian side of the Bosphorus Sea from the marble terrace of the Sakip Sabanci Museum in Istanbul. The mirror, in this case, operates as a kind of cultural and pictorial index, recording not […]