Video – Tate Unlock Art: Exploring the Surreal

The Doctor travels through time to bring us the story of Surrealism Need some help getting to grips with Surrealism? The Doctor will see you now. Peter Capaldi, a former art student, and the latest actor to play Doctor Who, settles down on Freud’s couch to deliver his wry take on the Surrealist movement.  

Julian Schnabel: Re-evaluated And Celebrated In New Dairy Art Centre Exhibition

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 […]

Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs review – ‘how rich, how marvellous, how alive’

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 […]

Top 10 Most Expensive Living British Artists – artnet News

It’s official, the art market is picking up after years spent in a post-crash lull. According to  TEFAF’s much discussed annual art market report, 2013 was the second best year on record, grossing €47.42 billion ($65.45). It was topped only by 2007, the vintage year of the last bubble. In this new series, artnet News […]

Gormley to Hirst: today’s top artists on the genius of Henry Moore

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.

George Bush’s paintings: this is the art of Forrest Gump

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 […]

Thierry Noir: the first graffiti artist fired up by the Berlin Wall

Monstrous as the Wall was, it offered artists like Noir – and musicians like Bowie – a dark subject matter that is lacking in safe consumerist societies. Has culture ever recovered from the fall of the Berlin Wall? Seriously. The division of Berlin and state surveillance endured by people trapped in the eastern half of the […]

Phyllida Barlow: Dock, Tate Britain

A joyous celebration of ad hoc creativity fills the Duveen Galleries. The revamping of Tate Britain has produced such an atmosphere of understated elegance that one hardly dares breathe for fear of displacing a particle of dust. An air of suffocating sterility has seeped into the displays, which are so tastefully arranged that even the […]

Martin Creed: First Major Survey A Multi Sensory Fun Fair

Unknown, alien objects disorientate you from your very first steps: once you’ve navigated past the dog-eared sofa that curiously blocks the entrance, Work No.1092 (2011) hurtles worryingly close above your head (or for taller visitors, could well threaten decapitation). It’s exciting, but witty too – the 12-metre long neon sign , spelling ‘Mothers’, dwarfs you […]

Howard Hodgkin: ‘Once I stop painting, they should start measuring my coffin’

He may be in his 80s and in need of a wheelchair to get about, but Howard Hodgkin still paints with staggering power. Jonathan Jones meets a ‘living master’. Howard Hodgkin sits in a wheelchair in his studio. Light falls through the glass roof on to big boards propped against white-washed brick walls. One by one, […]

Why Gagosian is the Starbucks of the art world – and the saviour

Art dealer Larry Gagosian pushes the best work – Richard Serra, Cy Twombly, Richard Wright, Urs Fischer – and fills the gap in our public galleries with real taste and belief.Is the Gagosian empire like the Starbucks of contemporary art? A megalomaniac attempt to corner the art market? It may seem so, but this chain store of […]

Double trouble: Art’s most controversial duos – video

One great rock duo – the Kills’ Alison Mosshart and Jamie Hince – explore the greatest duos in art.  Featuring double-acts such as Gilbert and George, Jake and Dinos Chapman, Marina Abramovic and Ulay, and Lucian Freud and Leigh Bowery, they examine this most intense bond as part of the Tate Unlock Art series. Watch […]

The Art of Curation – Hans Ulrich Obrist

Behind every great artist is a great curator. But what do they actually do? Serpentine superstar Hans Ulrich Obrist reveals the delights and dangers of his craft – while Yoko Ono, David Shrigley and more pick their all-time favourite show. Diaghilev and Cocteau tried to explain what they did with the words: “Etonnez moi!” Astonish […]

The 10 greatest works of art ever

From mysterious 30,000-year-old cave paintings to a ‘cathedral of the mind’ by Jackson Pollock, art critic Jonathan Jonesnames his favourite artworks of all time – and where in the world you can see them. What would make your top 10?

Peter Doig: Early Works review – ‘A show all would-be artists should visit’

In laying bare his first pieces, the British painter reveals how he bubbled over with excitement in his student days – and teaches a valuable lesson in how artists can find their signature style. It takes a special kind of courage for a famous artist to drag 40-year-old apprentice pieces out of the attic and […]

Speculating on Trophy Art

LONDON — Works by contemporary artists born after 1945 generated $17.2 billion in worldwide auction sales last year, a 39 percent increase from 2012, according to figures just released by the French database Artprice. Last November, a triptych by Francis Bacon sold for $142.4 million, a record for any work of art at a public […]

The 10 weirdest artworks ever

From sexy heels trussed and presented on a silver platter to Damien Hirst’s formaldehyde shark, a tour through some of the strangest, most shocking surrealist art around.  Check it out.

Art World Places Its Bet

LONDON — Before a standing-room crowd at Christie’s here last month, the bidding opened on an abstract painting filled with black scratching, “Burrito” scrawled across the top in bright yellow. The auctioneer announced that there were already 17 telephone and absentee buyers vying for the canvas, made three years ago by Oscar Murillo, who just […]