Christopher Wool poetry
Christopher Wool is obsessed with doing things wrong. (Jeez, seems to have worked out just fine for him!)
Category Archives: Exhibitions/Reviews
Sculptor Anish Kapoor brings new stone works to old Istanbul
For his first major show in Turkey, famed Indian-born British sculptor Anish Kapoor brought huge works that have never before been exhibited to a gallery that ripped down walls to accommodate him. Massive slabs of rough-hewn slate, polished Iranian onyx and rough sandstone, weighing a combined 110 tonnes, dominate the galleries at Istanbul’s Sakip Sabanci Museum.
Returning Home, but Always Going Forward Recent David Hockney Work at the de Young in San Francisco
At 76, David Hockney is in one of his primes, and apparently he knows it. Not for nothing is his exuberant, immersive survey at the de Young Museum here cheekily titled “David Hockney: A Bigger Exhibition.” By then [early 1980’s] Mr. Hockney was one of the most popular of all living artists. Thousands of people […]
Glorious 40-Part Motet returns to National Gallery for holidays – video
The National Gallery has re-installed Forty-Part Motet, the sound work by Janet Cardiff that is one of the very best things in the Gallery’s permanent collection. Forty-Part Motet consists of 40-plus voices, each singing its own part of the 16th-century choral piece Spem in Alium, by Thomas Tallis, and each heard through its own speaker. The 40 speakers are […]
Martin Creed – A Complexity that Trumps Similarities
Sometimes I think the British artist-musician Martin Creed makes art for dummies, not excluding myself. At the same time, his accumulations and arrangements of everyday objects and materials initially seem so rudimentary and forthright that they can also make you feel smart. Roberta Smith reviews Martin Creed
Art in 2013 (NY Style)
This year, matters of art jazzed people who rarely look at art works, occasioning much highly general, though lively, chatter. By Peter Schjedahl, The New Yorker
Jacob Kassay: ‘IJK’
Jacob Kassay turns 30 next year, which means he has time to develop some originality to match his surfeit of intelligence and attitude.
Jake and Dinos Chapman: Come and See, Serpentine Sackler Gallery
The Chapmans not only are what they are, but they embody what they are to perfection. And just when you think you may have outgrown them yourself – like you might a lover whose jokes have grown wearisome, but really, it’s you, it’s you – they hijack your affections once more by being both brilliant and […]
Being Kazimir Malevich, in Amsterdam
All eyes were on the Rijksmuseum when it re-opened in April after a 10-year refurbishment, but across the Museumplein, Amsterdam’s gallery of contemporary and modern art, the Stedelijk, was already settling into its new look, unveiled six months before. With its world-beating collection and extended galleries, it is already an attractive destination, but a remarkable […]
Did Someone Say Schnabel? The “Me Generation” Retakes the Art World
“A bunch of rubbish” was the verdict, offered only half in jest by the predictably dyspeptic English journalist. He was surrounded by huge paintings covered with shards of broken crockery and slathered with crudely painted images. Yes, rubbish, but is that not the quest of the avant-garde, to magically spin art from dross like some […]
Donald Judd: ‘Stacks’
Donald Judd once wrote that an artist’s main challenge is to find “the concatenation that will grow” — in other words, an artistic preoccupation that will sustain a lifetime of development, not peter out by the third or even second show.
Painting’s Endgame – Christopher Wool at the Guggenheim
Christopher Wool is one of many painters who have experimented with bringing their medium to extinction. They strip it of familiar attributes like imagery, brushwork or flatness, often ending up with some kind of monochrome that suggests the last painting that could possibly be made. Again and again, these works make viewers ask, in effect: […]
Huge naked figure and blank gallery where people can chat about the economy… it’s Turner Prize time again
The bookmaker’s favourite to win is Glasgow-based artist David Shrigley whose piece Life Model features a larger than life naked male robot. Show-goers are encouraged to take part by drawing the model and their efforts are displayed around the gallery. Among the best known artists in the running for the £25,000 prize money is Berlin-based […]
The Stuff of Building and Destroying
‘Chris Burden: Extreme Measures,’ at the New Museum. “Chris Burden: Extreme Measures” at the New Museum is a superb survey, but also a kind of transfiguration. It liberates the Los Angeles-based Mr. Burden from the clutches of history, expanding and rebalancing our understanding of his art.
Carol Bove: ‘RA, or Why is an orange like a bell?’
The protean Carol Bove continues to cultivate her extraordinary garden, operating in the gaps between art and design, modernism (especially Minimalism) and nature, language and structure, found and made, order and chaos, her work/art and other people’s work/art. One of the best artists of our peculiar moment, …
Peter Doig: No Foreign Lands, Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh
Billed as a homecoming, the first Edinburgh retrospective for the painter Peter Doig lingers in the imagination, says Alastair Sooke. With the exception of Gauguin, the French stockbroker who plunged into Tahiti with whom Doig is frequently compared, there are few artists it makes less sense to consider through the filter of their national identity. […]
Peter Doig: a taste for the tropics
Forget pickled sheep and unmade beds – Peter Doig’s new show will turn the Scottish National Gallery into a temple of painterly delights. The pleasure principle struggles for recognition these days as a measure of art appreciation. The pleasure of paint in particular, with life-drawing as its grammar, has been brushed aside with gestures heavy in conceptual irony. There […]
Ugo Rondinone: ‘Soul’
Lately the ever-versatile artist Ugo Rondinone has focused with a certain steadiness on figurative sculpture — without, as usual, repeating himself.
The Sublime in Jeff Koons
I Found the Sublime in Jeff Koons (and No One Agreed With Me) Walter Robinson reviews three New York exhibitions by Jeff Koons at Gagosian, Paul McCarthy at Hauser & Wirth and James Turrell at
Inside 20,000 balloons: Martin Creed’s fun, disorienting Work No. 202
No more envying the kids in the ball room at IKEA. The National Gallery has a new work of contemporary art that’s sort of an adult version of a ball-filled room, with a subtext of deep thinking. The installation is titled Work No. 202: Half the Air in a Given Space, and it’s byMartin Creed, who won Britain’s sometimes-controversial […]