Does Gagosian’s New Advisory Firm Create a Conflict of Interest?

Gallerists and art advisors suspect there could be ulterior motives to the industry leader’s latest power play, but Gagosian would beg to differ. When one of America’s most powerful art dealers makes plans for the future, people pay attention. But some critics suspect that Gagosian’s plan to enter the art advisory field will lead to […]

From the Green Market to the Gallery Wall

Karin Sander’s Kitchen Pieces draw your attention to the rhythmic ridges of an acorn squash, the bumpy peel of an orange, and the spiky surface of a yellow dragon fruit. I wanted to write about German artist Karin Sander’s exhibition Kitchen Pieces at Carolina Nitsch in New York from the outset; it’s that novel and striking. The exhibition opened […]

Bean There, Done That: Houston Gets a Precursor of Chicago’s Shiny Anish Kapoor

“I think much more than ‘Cloud Gate,’ ‘Cloud Column’ is meant specifically to capture the heavens and bring them down to earth” . The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH) unveiled a new outdoor sculpture on Monday, a monumental reflective piece by Anish Kapoor that immediately brings to mind his iconic “Cloud Gate” in Chicago, more widely known as […]

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 […]

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 […]

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: […]

A New Documentary Reveals the Living, Breathing Joseph Beuys

For the first documentary ever made about Beuys, director Andres Veiel dug into the archives, creating a film that is 95% footage of the artist. The first major documentary on Joseph Beuys, simply titled Beuys, is finally screening in New York for a short run at Film Forum. The artist is often referred to as Germany’s most important artist since World War […]

The Continuing Saga of the Architect Made into a Diamond

The power games of Jill Magid’s project concerning the archives of Luis Barragán continue in an extensive exhibition that completes the circle without any conclusive resolution. MEXICO CITY — A long saga has developed out of Jill Magid’s most controversial and highly publicized project yet. Magid unearthed the ashes of famed Mexican architect Luis Barragán […]

Beer with a Painter: Albert Oehlen

The long-reigning bad boy of German painting has consistently poked and prodded at whatever preciousness we associate with the medium. The long-reigning bad boy of German painting has consistently poked and prodded at whatever preciousness we associate with the medium. Early in his career, fueled by his association with Martin Kippenberger and other Junge Wildeartists, he […]

Censorship, Not the Painting, Must Go: On Dana Schutz’s Image of Emmett Till

Presuming that calls for censorship and destruction constitute a legitimate response to perceived injustice leads us down a very dark path. The presence of blackness in a Whitney Biennial invariably stirs controversy — it’s deemed to be unfit or not enough, or too much. The current Whitney Biennial is no exception — the art press […]

Getty Acquires Concrete Poetry by Two Modern Pioneers of the Form

Works by Scottish poet Ian Hamilton Finlay and Brazilian poet Augusto de Campos have joined the Getty’s collection and will go on view in an exhibition opening next week. Tug, fug, chug, glug — such are the rhyming words used by the writer and artist Ian Hamilton Finlay in “Poem with 3 Stripes,” one of his […]

Moon as Muse: Centuries of Artistic Interpretations of Earth’s Mysterious Satellite

Through around 60 historical and contemporary objects, Lunar Attraction at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem considers the enduring artistic curiosity for the mysteries of the moon. SALEM, Mass. — As demonstrated by the metal cosmic forms on the 3,600-year-old Nebra Sky Disk, unearthed in Germany in 1999, humans have been visually reacting to the moon for an […]

A Luminous Look at Turner’s Port Paintings

An exhibition at the Frick Collection unites for the first time three of J.M.W. Turner’s 1820s port paintings, created in an age of newly open borders in Europe. As Ian Wardropper, director of the Frick Collection in Manhattan, remarked at the preview for the new exhibition Turner’s Modern and Ancient Ports: Passages through Time, J.M.W. Turner created […]

From Seminal Fluid to Sassy Scribbles: The “Non-Art” Works of Marcel Duchamp

Even after digesting this considerable amount of ostensibly transitory disclosure, Duchamp remains an unadulterated, irreverent enigma. While his readymades are a triumph of pure indifference over taste, admirers of Marcel Duchamp continue to be far from indifferent to this cryptic artist. By offering more than homage, Elena Filipovic’s The Apparently Marginal Activities of Marcel Duchamp, […]

How the Met’s [1971] Sale of a Max Beckmann Painting Changed US Museums

Beckmann’s “Self-Portrait with Cigarette” belonged to the Metropolitan Museum until 1971, when its deaccession set off a series of disputes that reshaped museum practices. The moment Adolf Hitler’s voice burst over the airwaves one summer night in 1937 declaring steadfast opposition to so-called “degenerate art,” 53-year-old painter Max Beckmann knew his time in his native […]

An Ambitious Survey of the Titans of Abstract Expressionism

BAC:  We saw this exhibition during Frieze week in London, and it is one of the best exhibitions we have ever seen – bar none. This expansive AbEx show is brash, irreverent, and unconstrained, just like the period it aims to express. The titans of Abstract Expressionism are on view now at The Royal Academy of […]

Tino Sehgal Dances Across the Line Between Art and Life

Sehgal’s latest work will likely go down as one of the 21st century’s most interesting hybrids between contemporary art and dance. I came for one reason and one reason only: to see if Sehgal, 40, recipient of this year’s Hans-Molfenter-Preis, could successfully make the exodus from contemporary art back into ballet. Numerous connections to other […]

Like LeWitt and his meticulous instructions for creating his works, Sandback didn’t so much make things (at least not the things he eventually exhibited) as plan them. His sculptures, when they left the studio, consisted of configurations, measurements, and ratios, along with specifications for the type and color of the yarn or elastic that would […]

Etel Adnan’s Vibrant, Visual Poems

“Colorists are epic poets,” said Charles Baudelaire, and here at the Serpentine Gallery we have both: a painter of abstract landscapes and a poet, not to mention activist, scribe, and filmmaker. Described as a polymath by Hans Ulrich Obrist inthe exhibition’s catalogue, Etel Adnan certainly seems to be a woman of many talents. Born in […]

An Artist’s Plot to Unlock Luis Barragán’s Archive with a Diamond Made from His Ashes

In a multiyear project that has exploded beyond any one gallery space, New York’s Jill Magid has reactivated the legacy of Mexican modernist architect Luis Barragán. Beyond a call for access to a one-of-a-kind archive, Magid’s work with Barragán is literary stagecraft that implicates a cast of characters involved in mysterious multinational negotiations, as well as legal and […]