The artist’s new show presents repainted versions of masterpieces, from Titian’s Venus and Mars to the Mona Lisa, with a shiny blue sphere placed in front of each. Standing in front of the Mona Lisa – only this version was around three times the size of the original and had a blue sphere on a […]
Why do artists always seem to have the blues? Since time immemorial, blue has held a special place in art history, evoking the loftiest sentiments, the most aristocratic pedigrees, and the profoundest spirituality. As a material, blue pigment has itself been a fetishized commodity, serving as everything from a prized color for Medieval monks to the […]
Just over a year ago, thousands of pro-democracy protesters took over Hong Kong’s busiest thoroughfares. This month, 31 life-sized naked bodies made by Antony Gormley fr om cast iron and fibreglass will infiltrate the skyline, overlooking some of the same streets. The arrival of the British artist’s Event Horizon, which is due to be unveiled […]
As the art world braces for an estimated $2 billion fall auction season in the next few weeks, it’s no secret that the global art market is moving ahead at a rapid-fire pace. The stakes appear higher than ever with an unprecedented number of seven-, eight-, even nine-figure works on the auction block. While headlines […]
He provokes anger, awe and huge prices for his controversial staged scenes of hostage situations and homeless shelters. The pioneer of ‘non-photography’ talks cliches, creative freedom – and his regrets. “In my time, I’ve been accused of being afraid to go out into the world to take pictures, like a so-called ‘real’ photographer does,” Jeff […]
In the spirit of Halloween, ARTINFO has compiled a list of nine gruesome contemporary art works that give us nightmares all year long. From David Lynch’s “Six Men Getting Sick” to Hermann Nitsch’s “Theater of Orgies and Mysteries,” we’ve covered all the bases as October 31 approaches. Read on for our full, illustrated list. By way of example, Piero […]
“Ai’s trees are made from parts of dead trees that are brought down from the mountains of southern China and sold in the markets of Jingdezhen, Jiangxi province. Ai transports these to his studio in Beijing where they are made into trees. As he says, “it’s just like trying to imagine what the tree looked […]
Marina Abramović had a gun put to her head. Joseph Beuys shared a gallery with a coyote. But with social media full of shocking images, is it worth today’s artists putting their lives at risk? In 1974, standing expressionless beside a table in a gallery in Naples, Marina Abramović began her performance piece Rhythm 0. […]
What do chorale singers, a craftsman’s showroom, a posh cafe with fur coats thrown over chairs and a library reading room have in common? Yes you guessed it – it must be Turner Prize time again! This year the latest nominees for this most prestigious British art prize have gone north to Scotland for the first […]
The Royal Academy of Arts is currently presenting a landmark exhibition of the Honorary Royal Academician, Ai Weiwei. Although Ai is one of China’s leading contemporary artists, his work has not been seen extensively in Britain and the Royal Academy is presenting the first major institutional survey of his artistic output. The exhibition includes significant […]
Anish Kapoor had no idea what he was getting into when he accepted the invitation to install artworks in the gardens of Versailles. On September 30, right wing politician Fabien Bouglé, a local councilman, published an article on the website of Nouvel Observateur in which he claims that the artist “has declared war on France” […]
The news release about Griffin Art Projects caught my attention not only because it was about a new gallery opening in Metro Vancouver. What I noticed was how one sentence was worded. Here’s what it said: “The inaugural exhibition has been drawn from the collections of Brigitte and Henning Freybe and Kathleen and Laing Brown . . […]
Twenty-five years ago this month, a Cincinnati jury wrote an exclamation point into the story of the culture wars that were raging through art museums and academia. The jury acquitted that city’s Contemporary Arts Center and its director of criminal obscenity charges for exhibiting a group of photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe, graphic sexual images that […]
On Wednesday, the 2015 Turner Prize exhibition held its preview at Tramway, the Glasgow art institution that’s hosting the prize this year.Sarah Munro, the outgoing director of the venue, and Paul Pieroni, co-curator of the exhibition, welcomed the throngs of arts journalists that included the top national newspapers and leading art magazines. Expectations were high. The […]
Brigitte and Henning Freybe will show work that might not be shown otherwise. A new public art gallery opening Saturday in North Vancouver is dedicated to showing the work of private collectors. It’s called Griffin Art Projects and is an initiative of Brigitte and Henning Freybe, two of Metro Vancouver’s major art collectors. The opening […]
ARTnews: During the walkthrough of the exhibition just now, you pointed to the “S-Curve” sculpture and said that, ‘In the age of Instagram, this is a selfie object.’ Now that you are on Instagram, have you enjoyed seeing the interaction between the art and viewer evolve? Anish Kapoor: I do see that. People look with […]
Anish Kapoor returns to Versailles tomorrow, September 22, to commence his artistic intervention on the sculpture Dirty Corner, which has been vandalized three times since its installation in the gradens of Versailles in June. But the artist, who initially announced that he would leave the massive steel artwork untouched after it had been smeared with anti-semitic […]
Last Thursday afternoon, I received an email from the artist Trevor Paglen. I’ll respect his privacy and not reveal the contents of the message, or the Gmail account he uses, but I’ll tell you about his sign-off. Instead of the standard message, “Sent from my iPhone,” or some cute variation on that along the lines […]
Many of Wolfgang Tillmans’s photographs begin with the German artist asking himself, “Can I do this?” Last week, at a preview of “PCR,” his new show at David Zwirner, in New York, Tillmans pointed out two new photographs of Sunset Boulevard, in Los Angeles, as examples of that process. One of the images is a […]
If there were any who doubted Ai Weiwei’s work matched his reputation, this rollercoaster of a show – racing between his time in jail, the Sichuan earthquake and 3,000 crabs – should silence them. Three-thousand porcelain river crabs clamber over one another in a great red, green and white sprawl of twitching legs and claws. […]