Damien Hirst Falling Off The Grid – Houghton Hall – Paul Carter Robinson

Last week I was a guest at the magnificent Houghton Hall, one of the most impressive Palladian houses in Britain. This is a house steeped in history and surprisingly still in the hands of the original descendants of Sir Robert Walpole, the first Prime Minister of Britain. Houghton Hall with its lavish interior design and […]

Cy Twombly’s Extravagant Synesthesia

Rosalind Krauss misreads Twombly in more ways than I can enumerate. In her essay, “Cy was here: Cy’s up” (ArtForum, September 1994), Rosalind Krauss made this observation about Cy Twombly: Twombly “misreads” Pollock’s mark as graffiti, as violent, as a type of antiform. And this misreading becomes the basis of all of Twombly’s work. Thus […]

Damien Hirst’s Post-Venice, Post-Truth World

The artist worked in secret on his first love, painting, for his new show. This is the anti-Venice, he says. LOS ANGELES — In army green camouflage and black sweats and with two heavy gold chains swinging with each step of his Nikes, Damien Hirst was in an unusually quiet mood. Sipping from a can […]

Team Gallery’s Jose Freire on Why He Is Quitting Art Fairs for Good – Part I

The veteran art dealer explains why he has soured on the art market’s central apparatus. The central driver of the modern-day art market, at least when it comes to galleries, is art fairs. They promise efficiency: for a hefty booth fee (plus travel and shipping costs), dealers from around the world can convene in a […]

Allan Kaprow, Before the Happenings

Considered the Father of the Happening, Kaprow started off as a painter whose work reflected a Cubist-inspired, pre-AbEx aesthetic. In his essay for the catalogue accompanying the exhibition ALLAN KAPROW. PAINTINGS NEW YORK at Hauser & Wirth’s uptown outpost, art historian Philip Ursprung describes Kaprow’s progression from painting to performance in three swift strokes: The story began […]

Young Painters Are Trying to Kill Me, Says the German Artist Albert Oehlen—But He’s Cool With It

As his new paintings and drawings go on view in Los Angeles and Berlin, the artist reflects on his experience as a young artist in Berlin in the ’70s. Albert Oehlen is something of a living legend. He might be 63, but his reputation as an enfant terrible remains. There’s something eternally youthful about the German painter, who first […]

Marcel Duchamp

If you were to make a list of who you believe are the most controversial artists in history, the name of Marcel Duchamp would be topping many of the lists. He was a French painter, sculptor, writer and a master chess player whose work is often associated with Dadaism and branches of conceptual art, although he does not really seem […]

10 Famous Installation Artists Whose Work You Have to Know

In a plethora of different forms and styles, the emergence of installation artists has changed the face of art. Involving the configuration of installation of objects in a space, installation artpresents a unified experience practiced by an increasing number of postmodernist artists. Mostly temporary, installation art draws the viewer in, engaging them in multiple ways and making them a part of […]

Conceptual Art Movements and Examples

The Conceptual art movement is probably the most radical and the most controversial plane in modern and contemporary art. Some artists, experts and art historians even dismiss it as art. Conceptual art is based on the notion that the essence of art is an idea, or concept, and may exist distinct from and in the absence of an object as […]

5 Empowering Artworks (and Exhibitions) Made During the Civil Rights Movement

Ai Weiwei proclaimed that “art is a very important weapon to achieve human freedom.” When examining the civil rights movement, there is no doubt that art played a pivotal role in shaping and advancing the fight for equality. Throughout the era, countless artists reacted to issues of violent racism, segregation, and black identity in the United […]

Back When Painting Was Dead

When Clement Greenberg, Frank Stella, and Donald Judd tried to define what makes a painting, they overlooked a central feature — capaciousness. It is routine to characterize the 1970s as a decade dominated by Conceptual Art, and artists such as Sol LeWitt, Lawrence Weiner, Joseph Kosuth, and Mel Bochner. Part of this thinking is market-driven: […]

Think About It: 9 Masterpieces of Conceptual Art You Need to Know

As explained in Phaidon’s The Art Museum, the world’s most comprehensive exhibition of fine art to be collected and presented in book format (each page is its own gallery room!), Conceptual Art “is not meant to be looked at aesthetically, but to be thought about intellectually.” In the following excerpt, we present 9 distinct approaches to this […]

Georg Baselitz Celebrates His 80th Birthday With a Berlin Gallery Show Packed With Museum Masterpieces

Why It’s Worth a Look: Marking the artist’s 80th birthday, this exhibition brings together significant works loaned from institutions and private collections, spanning the breadth of Baselitz’s long career. One of Germany’s most significant and celebrated artists, Baselitz is a part of a generation of artists that reinvented German painting in an era that was struggling […]

Jasper Johns Still Doesn’t Want to Explain His Art

LOS ANGELES — Not long ago, Jasper Johns, who is now 87 and widely regarded as America’s foremost living artist, was reminiscing about his childhood in small-town South Carolina. One day when he was in the second grade, a classmate named Lottie Lou Oswald misbehaved and was summoned to the front of the room. As […]

Why Frieze Los Angeles Would Be Dead on Arrival (and Other Insights)

This week, our columnist draws on his LA gallery experience to chart the pitfalls of Frieze’s potential westward expansion. THE RUMOR On Thursday, Charlotte Burns and Allan Schwartzman reported in Art Agency, Partners’s “In Other Words” newsletter that “the Frieze Art Fair is looking to launch a Los Angeles event in January 2019.” A Frieze […]

The Artist Who Invented the Upside-Down Painting

The market is on the up for Georg Baselitz, one of the world’s greatest-living painters, who celebrates his 80th birthday this year Expelled from art school aged 18, Georg Baselitz has gained a reputation as a provocateur, creating works that cause scandal and turn conventional approaches to painting, quite literally, on their head. Baselitz’s 80th birthday in January […]

Shock of the Nude

Turning bodies into paint brushes, Carolee Schneemann’s performances, films and art still startle, as a retrospective at MoMA PS1 shows. Some people in the art world say that #MeToo has gone too far. What modern misogynist will be yanked from museums next? Gauguin? Picasso? I say, sure, why not? Let’s set them aside for awhile, […]

Damien Hirst on his greatest career move – breaking into his neighbour’s home

He was living in a squat and stuck in a creative rut. Then one day, concerned for his neighbour’s safety, he broke into his house. What he found there triggered an artistic explosion. In the early 1980s, I was living in a squat in White Hart Lane with a painter friend, trying to put enough […]

Business, But Not As Usual

Tension in the Tectonic Plates Underlying the Market.  Everything you ever wanted to know about the art market but didn’t know who to ask The good news: the figures are big, demand is deep and there are more collectors buying art than ever. Meanwhile, there is real tension in the tectonic plates underlying the market. This […]

5 Disruptive Trends Art Galleries Need to Understand If They Want to Survive

At this year’s Talking Galleries symposium in Barcelona, the debates boiled down to a few core issues. Here they are: 1. The Scale and Pace of the Gallery Sector Have Become Cancerous for Many. 2. Different Tiers of Galleries Are Now Playing Different Games With Different Rules. 3. The Art Industry Must Break Out of […]