The artist’s new show presents repainted versions of masterpieces, from Titian’s Venus and Mars to the Mona Lisa, with a shiny blue sphere placed in front of each. Standing in front of the Mona Lisa – only this version was around three times the size of the original and had a blue sphere on a […]
Why do artists always seem to have the blues? Since time immemorial, blue has held a special place in art history, evoking the loftiest sentiments, the most aristocratic pedigrees, and the profoundest spirituality. As a material, blue pigment has itself been a fetishized commodity, serving as everything from a prized color for Medieval monks to the […]
Alberto Burri’s prescient paintings — in patched, burned and otherwise abused burlap, plastic or wood — form a lavish, beautiful and admirable, if sometimes monotonous retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum. It presents an artist who is impressive less for the profundity of his work than for his consistency and his ideas, which remain very much […]
You can’t fault art dealer Larry Gagosian’s taste. Not only has he commissioned a spacious and elegant new art gallery in London’s Mayfair, but it opens with a Cy Twombly exhibition. By the time Twombly died in 2011, he had become a figure of unique mystery and authority in modern art – an American who […]
“No one wants to be a market darling,” an art dealer once told me. It’s the art world equivalent of a one-hit wonder, where sudden stardom and outsize demand for a particularly hot artist creates intense pressure, and has the potential to create unsustainable spikes in his or her market and career. Notwithstanding the fact that the […]
The news release about Griffin Art Projects caught my attention not only because it was about a new gallery opening in Metro Vancouver. What I noticed was how one sentence was worded. Here’s what it said: “The inaugural exhibition has been drawn from the collections of Brigitte and Henning Freybe and Kathleen and Laing Brown . . […]
The wait is over. After a 15-month delay, ballooning costs, and lawsuits, the Broad Museum is finally set to open this Sunday in downtown Los Angeles. The new 120,000 square foot institution houses the postwar and contemporary art collection of Eli and Edythe Broad. For the past four decades, the couple has had an outsized […]
Many exhibitions are good, some are great and a very few are tantamount to works of art in their own right — for their clarity, lyricism and accumulative wisdom. The Museum of Modern Art’s staggering “Picasso Sculpture” is in the third category. Large, ambitious and unavoidably, dizzyingly peripatetic, this is a once-in-a-lifetime event. It sustains […]
There have been persistent murmurs in the art world about the imminent (market) demise of the so-called Zombie Formalism movement, a kind of colorful, undemanding type of abstract painting that’s commanded astronomical prices for the past few years. Dire predictions and a few disappointing auction results aside, the evidence is hardly overwhelming. And yet, looking ahead to the fall’s most […]
From his earliest performances and actions in the 1960s involving animal remains through his infamous multi-day, multimedia festivals staged at an Austrian castle, Hermann Nitsch has remained a figure of boldness and controversy. Earlier this year a major show at Museo Jumex in Mexico City wascancelled — but no such fate has befallen the artist’s […]
LONDON — The art market is a notoriously opaque business. And over the past couple of years the highly speculative trade in emerging artists has given off plenty of heat. In 2014, recently made works by young abstract painters like Oscar Murillo, Lucien Smith, Alex Israel, Mark Flood and Christian Rosa were being “flipped” at […]
At 77 years old, Daniel Buren has lost none of his disruptive streak and continues to talk frankly. Throughout his career, Buren has challenged the viewer’s concept of space with his in-situ works. In 1971, in the Guggenheim Museum, he controversially installed a 66 x 32 ft. canvas banner with his signature vertical stripes, which […]
The fall art season is quickly upon us as galleries in New York return from their August hibernation and bring out key shows to chase away the summer languor. To help you navigate the mess of fall openings, we offer up a calendar of some of the exhibitions we’re most anticipating at museums and galleries […]
Are you a newly-minted tech millionaire with cash to burn and an urge to start an art collection? If so, you’re the unicorn that every art dealer in America is hoping to take for a ride. Why else would mega-galleries like Gagosian, Pace, and David Zwirner be making it out to the Seattle Art Fair this summer? They’re looking to […]
For decades, art advisers were a small club of professionals who personally helped build collections for clients, using their scholarship and connoisseurship. Their role was to consult and offer expertise, rarely to make deals. But the rapidly changing art market — characterized by soaring prices, high fees and a host of wealthy new buyers from […]
LOS ANGELES – Eli Broad is a man with a reputation for getting things done. After building two Fortune 500 companies from the ground up, he transferred his drive to philanthropy about fifteen years ago; his achievements have since included almost single-handedly creating a cultural centre for downtown Los Angeles, including its monumental anchor – the Frank […]
Our living ladies span four continents, with work that at times reflects the diversity of their geographical profiles. Using data drawn from the artnet Price Database over the past ten years, there are some shifts from our previous report. Three newcomers join the list, two are no longer on it, and Cady Noland still holds […]
Though he has produced pottery and paintings, sculptures, music and video works, Theaster Gates is best known, as we put it in our new monograph, for projects that “bridge the gap between art and life and encourage change by reaching beyond a traditional art audience.” He saved remnants of derelict churches, created black-tar paintings in […]
Marc Quinn’s last London show, five years ago, featured figurative sculptures of defiantly non-Classical subjects including pregnant men, women with penises and a lady called Chelsea Charms who apparently has the dubious honor of possessing the largest breasts on planet earth (although the fickle nature of this kind of fame means she may no longer […]
LONDON — Marc Quinn led the way through his East London studio late last month, past a marble sculpture of a fetus, a photorealist painting of raw meat and a bronze statue of Kate Moss in a yoga position. Entering his workroom, he casually walked over distorted three-dimensional canvases of seascapes strewn across the floor. […]