A set of vividly coloured rollers wrapped in shiny metallic sheeting is stopping visitors in their tracks at Art Basel. The work, available with Daniel Blau (2.0/D3), seems to have come straight from the studio of Jeff Koons. ButUntitled (Mylar Sculpture I-III), 1969-70, is actually by the Pop Art master Andy Warhol, known for his […]
WAKEFIELD.- Yorkshire Sculpture Park announces an exhibition by Ai Weiwei, opening in the Park’s newly refurbished 18th century chapel following a £500,000 restoration. The project, the first by Ai Weiwei in a British public gallery since Sunflower Seeds at Tate Modern in 2010, is accompanied by poetry readings from the works of celebrated poet Ai […]
Two exhibitions of new work by the Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei have opened in the UK. The first at a public art gallery in Yorkshire (Yorkshire Sculpture Park (YSP) is his first in a British public gallery since Sunflower Seeds at Tate Modern in 2010. iron tree, 2013 is a majestic six-metre high sculpture […]
Yorkshire Sculpture Park has a strange new tree. Solid yet graceful, inspired by the street vendors of Jingdezhen in southern China, who sell wood for its beauty, “Iron Tree” (2013) is a collection of fragments held together with bolts. It seems to have been in the wars, this tree, much like its maker Ai Weiwei. […]
“I force myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own taste,” proclaimed Marcel Duchamp, Dada master and the man behind everyone’s favorite urinal. The phrase only begins to explain the versatile, zany and ever-evolving works of the French-American artist, famously known for “The Fountain,” his 1917 pièce de résistance that will go […]
James Franco’s new exhibition at Pace is bad. It’s not a George W. Bush–caliber train wreck, but it’s close. The exhibition, “New Film Stills,” features 29 photographs from Franco’s series inspired by Cindy Sherman’s seminal “Untitled Film Stills” (1977–80). In each black-and-white photograph the artist-actor-scholar appears dressed (or undressed) in women’s clothes, often sporting a wig and makeup, for […]
Bilbao exhibition of installations, music and films demonstrates avant-gardiste’s true talents, her reach and influence. ‘The ladder John had to climb up was very high,” recalls Yoko Ono as we chat about one of her most famous works. It is called Ceiling Painting or Yes Painting, and it is one of the classics of conceptual art that […]
2017 will mark the 100th anniversary of the day Marcel Duchamp walked into the Society of Independent Artists lugging a porcelain urinal he had purchased at 5th Avenue’s J. L. Mott Iron Works and submitted it as a “readymade” sculpture. Duchamp’s radical and audacious gesture was met, at the time, with shock and indignation—it was literally hidden away behind a screen during the […]
It is what it was, and what it has become. Where would we be without it?
A woman walks into a grocery store and asks the clerk for some broccoli. The clerk responds that they’re fresh out of broccoli, but the woman refuses to yield on her request. After a bit of back-and-forth, the exasperated clerk offers: Clerk: Ma’am, spell the “car” in carrot. Woman: C-A-R. C: Okay, now spell the […]
Alastair Sooke looks back on the riddling Frenchman’s important, but little-known, summer holiday in Herne Bay exactly 100 years ago. No modern artist was as riddling and enigmatic as the Frenchman Marcel Duchamp. Born in 1887, he spent his life upending expectations about what art could be. Even his most diehard disciples were confounded by his decision in 1923 […]
Walter De Maria, a reclusive American sculptor whose multifaceted achievement and sly Dadaist humor helped give rise to earthworks, Conceptual Art and Minimal art, on an often monumental scale, died on Thursday in Los Angeles. He was best known for large-scale outdoor works that often involved simple if rather extravagant ideas or gestures: a SoHo […]
As two of the world’s most prominent collectors of contemporary art, Anita Zabludowicz and her husband,Poju, have amassed enough work over their four decades of collecting to fill not only their homes but also elegantly appointed public exhibition spaces in London and New York. However, the couple stands apart from the majority of the elite collector class […]