In October 2012, Chicago-based artist Theaster Gates bought a 70,000-square-foot building from the City of Chicago. Constructed in 1923, the building was previously Stony Island Trust & Savings Bank, located between Chicago’s Greater Grand Crossing and South Shore neighborhoods. The city was ready to demolish it; Gates couldn’t let it go. The cost for this fixer-upper, […]
BAC’s last posting re the Seattle Art Fair … Seattle has suffered an inferiority complex and craved a place at the international — or even national — art world table for as long as I’ve been here, and both Seattle Art Fair and Out of Sight stepped up, with remarkable esprit, to finally do something […]
This summer, we’re taking a look once again at the top ten British artists over the past ten years. Looking at the artnet Price Database, we kick off with the top artists by lot, and then give a list of artists by value over the same period. Comparing it to last year’s ten-year look at […]
SEATTLE — Paul Allen came ready to shop. Mr. Allen, a billionaire co-founder of Microsoft and one of this city’s major cultural patrons, strolled the aisles of the inaugural Seattle Art Fair on Thursday, looking to add to his formidable art collection. “Just walking around, I’ve probably seen a half-dozen paintings that I would consider,” […]
Amid the seemingly endless schedule of international art fairs that take place around the world each year, all art world eyes will be on Seattle this week, where the inaugural Seattle Art Fair, opens on Thursday July 30 and runs through August 2. Previous attempts at organizing fairs here have never really gotten off the […]
Artnet News Part Two of the top 55 European Galleries is below, including Iceland, Italy, Ireland, Norway, Portugal, Sweden and the UK. Pictured is Nicholas Logsdail, Founder and Director of London’s Lisson Gallery, representing a wide range of significant conceptual artists including: Marina Abramović, Ai Weiwei, Allora & Calzadilla, Art & Language, Cory Arcangel, Broomberg […]
According to Artnet News, Part One of the top 55 European galleries is below: Europe’s cities offer a wealth of contemporary art galleries, making the continent an important destination for art lovers across the world. Those looking to admire both established and leading artists, as well as seek out new and emerging talent, flock to Europe’s top […]
He kickstarted German punk, went on a mission to rescue Joseph Beuys and escaped the eastern bloc pursued by guard dogs. In a rare interview, one of Germany’s leading artists relives his extraordinary adventures. Imi Knoebel is surrounded by so many colours he has lost count. “I have 600, maybe 700,” he says. They hang […]
In the summer of 1967, Martin left New York and went off-grid before reappearing in New Mexico. The art she made there – with its buoyant bands of colour – offer no clues to the turbulent life of an artist who was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. Ahead of a major retrospective, Olivia Laing celebrates her […]
Amid the impostures that sometimes pass for 21st-century art, Doig’s record-breaking compositions are jewels of imagination and haunting vision. It must be the most expensive canoe in history. This week in Manhattan a painting by Edinburgh-born Peter Doig of a small white boat lost in a tangle of weeds and tree stumps in some remote […]
The new home of the Whitney Museum of American Art, in all its 28,000 tons of glory (as architect Renzo Piano pointed out during the preview Thursday), opens to the public May 1 in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District (see Does the New Whitney Museum Herald a Golden Age for New York Institutions?). artnet News joined the preview, […]
Let’s cut to the chase: the Whitney Museum of American Art’s inaugural show in its new home in the Meatpacking District, “America Is Hard to See,” is outstanding. With about 600 works by a little over 400 artists, it offers a history of American art—and America—that is richly textured and that teems with beloved classics […]
From outside, Renzo Piano’s new Whitney Museum of American Art, set beside the Hudson River, has the bulk of an oil tanker’s hull. Inside is entirely different. The galleries, with high ceilings, tall windows and soft pine-plank floors, are as airy and light-flooded as the 19th-century sailmaker’s lofts known to Herman Melville, who worked as […]
Gates made his name by staging soul food dinners in honour of a fictional Japanese potter. Now he is recycling the fabric of Chicago’s past, including its bricks and mortar, to transform the city’s depressed areas. In 2007 Theaster Gates held a series of soul food dinners on Chicago’s South Side to honour his mentor, […]
Seven years ago, Marlene Dumas briefly became the world’s most expensive living female artist, a dizzying upward move that was reported, somewhat breathlessly, in newspapers from New York to Tokyo (her 1995 paintingThe Visitor was sold by Sotheby’s for £3.1m; previously, her prices had stood at around the £50,000 mark). Yet her name remains, here and […]
Don’t attend the show seeking easy joys. Few are on offer in the work of the thirteen Americans, three Germans, and one Colombian—nine women and eight men—and those to be found come freighted with rankling self-consciousness or, here and there, a nonchalance that verges on contempt. The ruling insight that Hoptman proposes and the artists […]
PARIS — Georges Bataille, in The Accursed Share, said that if the Marquis de Sade had not existed, he would have had to been invented. But probably one of the biggest badasses of all time did exist. And, as if to prove it, on the bicentenary of the death of the “divine marquis” (Donatien Alphonse de […]
From Anselm Kiefer’s rotting sunflowers to a rollicking super-show all over Scotland, via Rembrandt, Matisse, Andy Warhol and Egon Schiele … it was an eye-opening year. From the rusty submarines hanging in a vitrine in the courtyard to bookworks in which photographs and black paint created eerie provocative assemblages, Anselm Kiefer’s retrospective rocked me. In […]
Unease grows as it gets harder for artists to resist servicing a booming market The art market appeared to be in rude health as 2014 drew to a close. More money was spent on blue-chip and emerging art last year than at any other point in history, and the trade has been in rapid expansion […]
This year hasn’t even come to an end. Yet, intrepid gallerists and collectors are no doubt already pulling out their calendars to mark out the fair circuit for the year 2015. To help weed out the best from the rest, artnet News’ European editors sorted through the stacks of notes and reports from the year’s fairs […]