Carl Andre is one of America’s greatest living sculptors. He has been mostly absent from the American art scene for decades, but recently returned to oversee the installation of a new retrospective. Watch the video.
A year away from opening, the new home of the Whitney Museum of American Art is still a construction site, but it is already a vivid presence in Manhattan’s meatpacking district, and curators have mapped out months’ worth of exhibitions there. The first show to go on view next spring — an opening date has […]
Two Shows Offer a New Look at Julian Schnabel. At the moment, Julian Schnabel’s painting seems to be the art that dares not speak its name. Its influence is widely visible but rarely cited. You can see it in the work of artists from Joe Bradley to Oscar Murillo and all sorts of painters who […]
The Dairy Art Centre in London is presenting the first exhibition in 15 years of the seminal American artist Julian Schnabel. The exhibition brings together new and rarely seen works created within the last two decades. Now known as much for his critically acclaimed films as for his art, this exhibition is both a re-evaluation […]
In 1976 I found myself in Düsseldorf, one stop on a mission to gather material for a special “European” issue of Art-Rite magazine (which we never managed to put out). One memorable highlight was a Sigmar Polke exhibition at the Frankfurt Kunsthalle. The entryway was blocked off by wood fencing, probably bought at a garden supply store, but visitors could […]
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 […]
The 2012 survey of the courageous Chinese artist Ai Weiweiseen at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington has finally arrived in New York, and is much improved. The show, “Ai Weiwei: According to What?,” which opens Friday at theBrooklyn Museum, has been beefed up throughout, but most notably by two installation pieces completed in 2013. One, “S.A.C.R.E.D.,” […]
A Sigmar Polke Retrospective Opens at MoMA. Get confused is the first and last message of “Alibis: Sigmar Polke 1963-2010” at the Museum of Modern Art. And if you think, as I do, that some degree of continuing bafflement is a healthy reaction to art, this disorienting contact high of a show is for you. Polke, who […]
The Martin-Gropius-Bau opened a one-man show of Ai Weiwei’s work titled “Evidence.” It spans three decades of the dissident Chinese artist’s career. Watch the Video.
Bees swarm, swallows swerve, a shark swims the wall … with a pair of giant dress-making scissors, Matisse cut himself free from the miseries of illness and old age, creating luscious cut-outs that unleashed a new art. Adrian Searle eats up a joyous show at Tate Modern. Scissors, paper, pins – these were all it […]
The answer is yes and no. Let’s begin with why Silicon Valley Contemporarycould be a success. The obvious allure for creating this new fair, and for the 50-some participating galleries to buy in for its first year, is that the tech sphere headquartered in Silicon Valley is generating more wealth more quickly than anywhere else in […]
Ahead of an exhibition of Moore’s work alongside that of today’s artists, Antony Gormley, Damien Hirst, Bruce Nauman and others talk about seeing bubbles in hula-hoops, sculpting from the gut – and how Moore changed what was possible.
There’s an mesmerizing aberration at David Zwirner Gallery, a technological siren that, once it locks its fearsome eyes on you, will drag you deep into the Uncanny Valley and feast on your brain. Occupying its own cavelike room in the gallery, which the viewer is encouraged to enter alone, this animatronic sculpture—a buxom blonde woman in […]
Ai Weiwei’s Colored Vases appeared at Seattle Asian Art Museum on April 5, quivering, just waiting to be smashed. Poor vases. Their cheerful, rainbow-candy appearance is so dumb it’s almost touching. They’re baubles with hidden stories, stories that go back two thousand years. But we’ll start with 1993. That year, Chinese artist Ai Weiwei returned to Beijing […]
There is good deal of irony in the manner in which Vancouver’s Jeff Wall presents his photograph “Invisible Man” by Ralph Ellison, the Prologue (1999–2000)—printed on a transparency and mounted on a light box. “The large-scale image is illuminated from behind by fluorescent lights, which Wall began using after seeing light-box advertisements in the late 1970s,” according […]
The comedy of a naive self-portrait apparently helped humanise the man most responsible for the 2003 invasion of Iraq. His portrait of Putin actually looks like something you would find in one of America’s trash-rich Salvation Army stores and buy to laugh at. It’s got a classic amateur clumsiness and oddity to it. Bush has […]
It was the exhibition that everyone seemed so eager to hate: Mega-dealer Larry Gagosian’s Lower East Side “pop-up” space, open through May 23, showcasing sculptures by Urs Fischer inside a former Chase bank on Delancey Street. (Another gallery outpost at 821 Park Avenue is hosting his massive bronze piece, “last supper.”) “How’s Gagmewithaspoon?,” my friend […]
Michael Snow is an unusual case of an artist best known for his least conventionally accessible works. Snow’s legacy will always be defined by in his groundbreaking structuralist films, especially the 1967 masterpiece Wavelength, even as opportunities to experience those works as they were meant to be seen become increasingly rare. (Snow has wryly addressed this […]
The Berlin show is vast, Ai’s largest ever, spanning 32,300 square feet in the Martin-Gropius-Bau. Most of the works are new, tracing the time since his relationship with the government went sour ahead of the 2008 Olympics. They also tend to take a more personal tone, playing up (for better or worse) the celebrity status […]
This photographer once dismissed as a shallow sensation-seeker of the 80s is getting the recognition he deserves with a show at the Grand Palais, Paris’s high temple of art – and it’s all down to Smith. The Grand Palais in Paris is one of Europe’s most serious exhibition spaces. It is where France honours its great artists. […]