What did the artists associated with Abstract Expressionism do so differently? And how is their work still relevant today? As the first survey of Abstract Expressionism for nearly 60 years is staged in Britain, co-curator David Anfam answers key questions. 1. How was Abstract Expressionism different to what came before? Crucially Abstract Expressionism, or ‘Ab […]
The dazzling, haunting ‘combines’ at the heart of Tate Modern’s forthcoming retrospective were part of a private game between Rauschenberg and his peers and sometime lovers, Cy Twombly and Jasper Johns. Robert Rauschenberg’s 1954 work Untitled is an upright wooden box supported by a white, colonial-era table leg over an open stage-like enclosure in which […]
Tate Modern’s retrospective of Mona Hatoum spans the artist’s 35-year career, and she has made a lot of art. Hatoum’s works mine geopolitics, gender, art history, and her own past to reveal a world that is frightening and complex. Hatoum’s practice is layered and asks for contemplation. By abstracting the everyday, objects are made distressing, […]
Susan Philipsz and John Cage have shown that the genre has claims to greatness, but two works in Edinburgh betray the emptiness of much sound art. Let’s get this straight, sound art buffs: of course art can be made with sound. It can be made with anything. The first masterpiece of sound art is Marcel […]
Anish Kapoor has the exclusive rights to paint using Vantablack, the blackest black that has ever existed – but other artists are keen to use it. Colour is precious. Colour can drive you mad – especially if you are an artist. The colours that artists use can be as expensive as gold – which installationist […]
Great art museums need great art. That should go without saying, but the new Tate Modern is so architecturally exhilarating that I started to wonder: perhaps you really can have a museum where it doesn’t matter much what’s in it because the experience of walking around is so enjoyable and cool. I love the Switch […]
artnet News picks the top of the crop in the UK.
From Athens to Zurich, here are the European galleries. Part 1
From Athens to Zurich, here are the some of the best European galleries. Part 2
Antony Gormley says his first White Cube exhibition in four years, which opens in September, is driven by “more of a sense of urgency” than any other show he has done. From the warming of our climate and the acidification of our seas to cities dominated by skyscrapers – “nothing more than expressions of virile […]
Last week, there were two major events relating to Francis Bacon and, on this occasion at least, they didn’t have anything to do with the artist’s record-breaking market, but with a renewed and in-depth understanding of his fascinating oeuvre and artistic process. On June 30, the Francis Bacon Estate published a new catalogue raisonné, presenting […]
Artists, architects and curators tell us about the spaces they love—and hate. What makes a museum building successful? Until the arrival of Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim in Bilbao in 1997, this question might have been almost exclusively focused on the best environments in which to view art. But the Guggenheim’s phenomenal success, which allowed the Basque […]
This week saw the first post-Brexit art auctions in London, and they brought considerable cheer to a market predominantly dismayed at the Leave decision. To a backdrop of a declining exchange rate for the pound and Britain losing its AAA rating status, on Monday Phillips turned in a modest total of £9.8m hammer (£11.9m with […]
LONDON — The day began in the Turbine Hall, the 85-foot-tall atrium at the heart of Tate Modern, the most visited museum of modern and contemporary art in the world. If the museum functions like a medieval cathedral — as the Lord Browne of Madingley, chairman of Tate’s Board of Trustees, suggested in a packet […]
Not much happens on time in London, let alone early. Switch House, the bold new Tate Modern extension opening on June 17, was originally planned for the end of next decade… ish. But five years after Herzog & de Meuron converted the Bankside Power Station, in 2000, visitor numbers had outpaced predictions by millions. According […]
When the new 10-story museum opens June 17, it will boast a huge performance space, rooftop terrace and more geographically diverse collection. In a year of glitzy museum openings, from New York’s Met Breuer to San Francisco’s sleek SF MoMA, London’s Tate Modern is upping the ante. On June 17, the museum will open the […]
Discover how a generation of artists swapped pencils for dumper trucks as they made the world their canvas. In the summer of 1967, while hitchhiking his way from St Martin’s School of Art to his home city of Bristol, the British art student Richard Long stopped in a field in Wiltshire, and walked repeatedly in […]
I meet Martin Creed more than a week before his retrospective What’s the point of it? opens at the Hayward. The gallery is full of 25 years’ worth of improbable, witty, uplifting art; I am especially gladdened by a wall covered in 1,000 prints of broccoli. But the show is not ready yet: the atmosphere […]
If you are even a casual appreciator of art in New York, the chances are that you have stepped into one of Annabelle Selldorf’s spaces, and been entranced. Perhaps the most coveted architect among the minimalistically inclined art elite, Selldorf has designed a broad spectrum of the city’s art sites, from theNeue Galerie uptown, steeped […]
Among the shafts of luxury flats sprouting up along the south bank of the Thames, from Battersea to Bermondsey, there is one new tower unlike the others. It is made of brick, not glass, and stands as a squat, truncated pyramid, twisting as it rises. Punctured only by thin slit windows, Tate Modern’s new extension […]