Ai Weiwei exhibit as monumental as Miami’s new Perez museum

There couldn’t be a better exhibition to inaugurate the new Perez Art Museum Miami than the traveling solo retrospective from the famous Chinese artist Ai Weiwei. Like the museum, Ai Weiwei: According To What? is monumental — physically huge, with a lot to say, and important for Miami. Contemporary Chinese art has been a hot commodity for […]

The Americans Are Coming: Warhol, Burroughs, Lynch

William Burroughs’s photographs offer real insight into his written work. Lynch’s and Warhol’s images pale by comparison. “A picture just means I know where I was every minute,” Andy Warholonce said. “That’s why I take pictures. It’s a visual diary.” In this instinct, Warhol was, as always, ahead of the game. One senses that he would […]

Isa Genzken at MoMA and the Schizoconsumerist Aesthetic

They love, love, love Isa Genzken over at the Museum of Modern Art, where the artist’s first major American museum survey remains on view through March 10, before traveling to museums in Chicago and Dallas. The 65-year-old Berlin-based German sculptor, whose 150 works fill 10 open-plan galleries on the museum’s sixth floor, is “one of the most important artists […]

‘Ileana Sonnabend: Ambassador for the New’ at the Museum of Modern Art

Two years ago, when the late Ileana Sonnabend’s family donated Robert Rauschenberg’s famous artwork Canyon (1959) to the Museum of Modern Art, a condition of the gift was that the museum put on a show about the legendary art dealer, who died in 2007. Curator Ann Temkin has now fulfilled that promise, …

Richard Serra – Shifting His Tectonic Plates

Richard Serra at the Gagosian Gallery.  Heavy metal. At the end of December, the PBS host Charlie Rose conducted a curious interview with Richard Serra about his new show in two locations of the Gagosian Gallery in New York, and it quickly became popular on the Internet. The conversation was notable mostly because it reached […]

He’s back … honestly! Chinese camouflage artist returns …

They may look like plain old photographs of road sides and supermarkets, but these meticulous images take hours to construct.  It is the latest series of camouflage trickery unveiled by artist Liu Bolin, or ‘the invisible man’, who made his name blending into the background of everyday scenes.

Sculptor Anish Kapoor brings new stone works to old Istanbul

For his first major show in Turkey, famed Indian-born British sculptor Anish Kapoor brought huge works that have never before been exhibited to a gallery that ripped down walls to accommodate him. Massive slabs of rough-hewn slate, polished Iranian onyx and rough sandstone, weighing a combined 110 tonnes, dominate the galleries at Istanbul’s Sakip Sabanci Museum.

Glorious 40-Part Motet returns to National Gallery for holidays – video

 The National Gallery has re-installed  Forty-Part Motet, the sound work by Janet Cardiff that is one of the very best things in the Gallery’s permanent collection. Forty-Part Motet consists of 40-plus voices, each singing its own part of the 16th-century choral piece Spem in Alium, by Thomas Tallis, and each heard through its own speaker. The 40 speakers are […]

What a difference five years make – ABMB

The super-rich have grown in number since 2008, adding the feel-good factor to this year’s fair. Millions of dollars have been spent on art, parties and hotel rooms this week as the circus surrounding Art Basel Miami Beach rolled into town. Given such conspicuous consumption, it is, perhaps, hard to remember that the art market […]

The secret stories that works of art can tell – ABMB

Our selection of pieces with back stories that add interest as well as value. Even though we are at an art fair, there is more to the works on show here than their price tags. There are many personal stories behind the paintings, sculptures and photographs on sale. Art historians are often interested in these […]

Report From Art Basel: A Frenzied Race to Move Monotonous Art

Back-pats were flying at yesterday’s VIP opening of Art Basel Miami Beach. Several booths had already sold out by midday, and there was no shortage of interest from swarms of bees collectors. The fair’s success was summed up by a dealer from Andersen’s Contemporary—a six-year ABMB veteran and Frieze and Armory exhibitor—when he told us, […]

Jake and Dinos Chapman: Come and See, Serpentine Sackler Gallery

The Chapmans not only are what they are, but they embody what they are to perfection. And just when you think you may have outgrown them yourself – like you might a lover whose jokes have grown wearisome, but really, it’s you, it’s you – they hijack your affections once more by being both brilliant and […]

Being Kazimir Malevich, in Amsterdam

All eyes were on the Rijksmuseum when it re-opened in April after a 10-year refurbishment, but across the Museumplein, Amsterdam’s gallery of contemporary and modern art, the Stedelijk, was already settling into its new look, unveiled six months before. With its world-beating collection and extended galleries, it is already an attractive destination, but a remarkable […]

Huge naked figure and blank gallery where people can chat about the economy… it’s Turner Prize time again

The bookmaker’s favourite to win is Glasgow-based artist David Shrigley whose piece Life Model features a larger than life naked male robot. Show-goers are encouraged to take part by drawing the model and their efforts are displayed around the gallery. Among the best known artists in the running for the £25,000 prize money is Berlin-based […]

The Stuff of Building and Destroying

‘Chris Burden: Extreme Measures,’ at the New Museum. “Chris Burden: Extreme Measures” at the New Museum is a superb survey, but also a kind of transfiguration. It liberates the Los Angeles-based Mr. Burden from the clutches of history, expanding and rebalancing our understanding of his art.

Carol Bove: ‘RA, or Why is an orange like a bell?’

The protean Carol Bove continues to cultivate her extraordinary garden, operating in the gaps between art and design, modernism (especially Minimalism) and nature, language and structure, found and made, order and chaos, her work/art and other people’s work/art. One of the best artists of our peculiar moment, …

Peter Doig: No Foreign Lands, Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh

Billed as a homecoming, the first Edinburgh retrospective for the painter Peter Doig lingers in the imagination, says Alastair Sooke. With the exception of Gauguin, the French stockbroker who plunged into Tahiti with whom Doig is frequently compared, there are few artists it makes less sense to consider through the filter of their national identity. […]