“It’s pretty remarkable the armory is letting us do this,” observed Mr. Eccles, who assembled the exhibition in partnership with Hans-Ulrich Obrist, artistic director of the Serpentine Galleries in London. Actually, the exhibition is in the spirit of earlier armory shows spotlighting off-center artists like Paul McCarthy and Christian Boltanski — both of which Mr. […]
“I remember going to a gallery opening and hearing people say ‘Andy is here, Andy is here,’ and suddenly I saw him through the crowd,” Mr. Ai recalled this week, walking through “Andy Warhol/Ai Weiwei” at the Warhol Museum here. “It was incredible to be in the same room, but I was a nobody.” In […]
I meet Martin Creed more than a week before his retrospective What’s the point of it? opens at the Hayward. The gallery is full of 25 years’ worth of improbable, witty, uplifting art; I am especially gladdened by a wall covered in 1,000 prints of broccoli. But the show is not ready yet: the atmosphere […]
Here are a few negative things you could say about Jordan Wolfson’s show: It’s dumb. It’s a spectacle. It’s loud. But you know what? This dumb, loud spectacle is one of the more thoughtful, oddly contemplative experiences you can have in Chelsea right now. During my visit the kinetic piece (titled, with sarcastic nonchalance, Colored sculpture) attracted […]
Among the shafts of luxury flats sprouting up along the south bank of the Thames, from Battersea to Bermondsey, there is one new tower unlike the others. It is made of brick, not glass, and stands as a squat, truncated pyramid, twisting as it rises. Punctured only by thin slit windows, Tate Modern’s new extension […]
For nearly 40 years, Ed Kienholz’s Five Car Stud (1969-72), a dark installation depicting a brutal racist attack, lay hidden away in storage in Japan. It is now on public view in Milan at the Fondazione Prada, which acquired the work in 2012, soon after it was restored by the artist’s widow and collaborator Nancy […]
After entering a system as powerful and monied as the higher echelons of the art world, how do we gauge the threshold between subversion and endorsement? On the one hand, the biggest beneficiaries of FIVE DECADES seem to have little relationship to or even awareness of the social justice movements and protests that have defined […]
Immaculate in a grey suit, Martin Creed strides towards me in the car park at Durslade Farm, home of Hauser & Wirth’s Somerset gallery. He could be a businessman out on his lunch break on a spring day. Then I notice the spatters and whiplashes of paint all over his clothes, the splodges of colour […]
There’s never a shortage of mega-art in Chelsea: a stroll one morning this week encountered such gallery-filling works as Jordan Wolfson’s deranged, chain-operated marionette (“Colored sculpture,” 2016) at David Zwirner and Anish Kapoor’s mammoth, packed-earth “She Wolf” (2016) at Gladstone. And then there’s Richard Serra, whose double-gallery blowout at Gagosian is Exhibit A for material-intensity-meets-overwhelming-scale. […]
Antony Gormley’s career spans thirty-five years, beginning with his first solo exhibition, at the Whitechapel Gallery in London, in 1981. With sculpture as a primary medium, Gormley’s work has explored the relationship of the human body to space and time, emphasizing the body as place rather than object. Gormley: I think it’s very important to […]
Richard Serra may have his ideological detractors, but he is certainly today’s greatest living sculptor of Minimalist abstraction. Exhibitions of new works occupying Gagosian Gallery’s two Chelsea display spaces find Mr. Serra at 76 still wrangling fundamentals of shape, space, gravity and time into objects and installations of thrilling severity. The most arresting piece at […]
Jordan Wolfson’s art delights me a little—which may be a strange thing to say for an artist whose most recent installation centers on a human-like robot being brutally tortured for the entertainment of its spectators. But Wolfson (b. 1980) delights me because I have this hypothesis that contemporary art—one of its strands, at least, particularly the […]
In one epic exhibition, the Vancouver Art Gallery explores the history of the remix, from Marcel Duchamp to Danger Mouse. For the epic exhibition “MashUp: The Birth of Modern Culture,” on view through June 12 at the Vancouver Art Gallery, the word [Mash-UP] has been wisely adopted to cover all the “mixing, blending and reconfiguration […]
Philippe Parreno is one of the most significant French artists of the past two decades. Throughout his work, which includes film, video, sound and writing and drawing, the artist has always explored the borders between reality and its representation utilizing the vocabulary and means typically associated with a variety of media such as radio, television, […]
Philippe Parreno will undertake this year’s Hyundai Commission for the Turbine Hall, at Tate ~Modern opening on 4 October 2016. Parreno is a French artist who works across film, video, sound, sculpture, performance and information technology. A key artist of his generation, Parreno explores the borders between reality and fiction and is known for investigating and […]
Political art has changed over the past 50 years. Unlike the protest art of an earlier era, much of the most interesting new work feels slippery and evasive, as if reluctant to speak its mind. In part, this is a reflection of different, though not necessarily evolved, thinking. We’ve abandoned old beliefs in utopias, in […]
Classified images leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden will figure as artworks at the Whitney Museum of American Art in its Laura Poitras solo exhibition, “Astro Noise,” opening next week. In an unprecedented sprint from headline to gallery wall, news of the covert intelligence program to which the works pertain will have scarcely broken […]
In Vancouver this January, some important moments in contemporary art: A Canadian artist’s Turner Prize-nominated work has its North American premiere; collector/real estate guru Bob Rennie mounts his most complex show yet at his own gallery; and Brian Jungen returns to his seminal source material – sneakers. Western arts correspondent Marsha Lederman walks us through […]
The maverick Scandinavian artist duo Elmgreen & Dragset focus on an art world staple—art fairs and their enduring popularity—in their latest show, The Well Fair, which opens at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (UCCA) in Beijing on Sunday (24 January-17 April). The artists have transformed the main hall of UCCA into a fictional fair […]
Three works by the celebrated British artist Anish Kapoor are on show in the Gallery of Honour at the Rijksmuseum until 6 March 2016. The three painted reliefs created from layers of red and white resin and silicone evoke images of bloody, sinewy lumps of meat. These extraordinary visceral works will enter a visual dialogue […]