Throughout the centuries, women have been making fascinating works of art but often remained in the shadows of their male counterparts. Many famous female painters of today had to fight against gender biases and opposition from the chroniclers of the art history. From various training and education restrictions to difficulties in selling their work and […]
FOR the first time in 20 years, the lead-up to the Whitney Biennial coincided with the presidential election, a background that could not help but inform the selection of artists and artwork that will be on view when the biennial opens on March 17, the first in the museum’s new downtown building. “An election year […]
Heralded as the most innovative and instrumental avant-garde movement, Cubism aggressively confronted Western core conceptions of pictorial representation. Cubist paintings introduced the most revolutionary chapter of art history, instigating a genuine cultural awakening. Representatives of this movement, namely Picasso and Georges Braque, aimed to revitalize the tired standards of art which they believed had run […]
Earlier this year it was revealed that sculptor and color-hoarder Anish Kapoor had been given exclusive rights to the blackest black in the world. Called Vantablack it was developed by British company NanoSystem—specialists in nanomaterials—who created it for military and scientific uses. However, after Kapoor contacted the company he was allowed to be the only […]
Many say it was the 2011 exhibition at the Palazzo Grassi museum in Venice that first ignited art buyers’ interest in a young Romanian artist named Adrian Ghenie, whose heavy palette-knife paintings are haunted by historical figures like Stalin, Hitler and the Nazi doctor Josef Mengele. Then, in 2015, Mr. Ghenie drew more attention when […]
Sean Scully now increasingly seems like the most remarkable abstract painter of his generation – this, at a time when abstract art, abstract painting, in particular, is increasingly under attack. We have, however, just received a reminder of how powerful and moving it can be from the magnificent Abstract Expressionist show now on view at the Royal Academy. Though Scully […]
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 […]
One evening in 1968, Mark Rothko regaled the art dealer Arne Glimcher, who had dropped by his studio on his way home from Pace Gallery in New York, with the story of a visit from a collector that day. Pointing to an enormous painting of dark blue and black rectangles floating on a deep burgundy […]
When the influential Museum of Modern Art curator Laura Hoptman claims that she’s “a painting person,” it’s no joke. A veteran organizer of cutting-edge exhibitions, she built her career in part through her insistence on championing the medium, even—or perhaps especially—through its perennial periods of unpopularity and critical disdain. This has earned her both accolades and […]
At an exhibition entitled “0.10” (“Zero Ten”) in St Petersburg in 1915, Black Square (completed in 1913), the first Suprematist work by Kazimir Malevich (1878–1935), hung in the corner of the room, the traditional setting for an icon in an Orthodox Russian home. The artwork was a square canvas painted black. Malevich claimed in 1927 […]
Tate Liverpool Klein anticipated pop art with his spirit of mockery and fun, but there was more to the French artist than painting with naked women, as this rare show reveals. Yves Klein was a joker, a thinker and an extreme provocateur. In his dragonfly life – born in 1928, dead of heart failure at […]
People say we’re in the middle of a second civil rights movement, and we are. The only surprise is that the first one ever ended. The artistKerry James Marshall was there for it. He was just a kid then, born in Birmingham, Ala., in 1955. But kids take in a lot. He was in Birmingham […]
Laing Brown is an art collector who is interested in ideas. Brown, chair of the Audain Art Museum acquisitions committee and an external advisor to the acquisitions committee of the National Gallery of Canada, has just returned from Britain, where he went to check out Frieze London, where 160 of the world’s top commercial galleries […]
The notion that collectors sit atop the hierarchy of today’s art world is axiomatic. They build private museums and control the boards of traditional ones. Through their acquisitions, they determine the fates of artists, and often overshadow curators, historians, and critics—all those ink-stained intellectuals who used to play a larger role in determining art’s value. […]
Painting has always served as a kind of laboratory for innovative ways of looking at the world, from the perspectival experiments of Alberti all the way to Impressionism, Cubism, Surrealism, abstraction,Minimalism, et cetera. Painters often saw themselves as an advance guard, pushing a kind of investigation forward in new terrain. Here, you’ve mentioned how in […]
Rembrandt’s perfect drawing, Caravaggio’s invention of Hollywood lighting, Monet capturing a moment in time. David Hockney and critic Martin Gayford discuss the craft behind the greatest art. David Hockney: The moment you put down two or three marks on a piece of paper, you get relationships. They’ll start to look like something. If you draw […]
There are beautiful, marvellous and terrifying things in the Royal Academy’s much-trumpeted survey of Abstract Expressionism. What more could one ask in a show including the explosive and tender Jackson Pollock; De Kooning swerving and jumbling and dismembering his frightening figures of women; Rothko’s tangy brightness and trembling, tremulous darkness;Barnett Newman’s zips and planes and […]
With works spanning two decades that force us to pause, reflect, and see the world through fresh eyes, Martin Creed has challenged what it means to be an artist. Born in Wakefield, England in 1968, Creed grew up in Scotland where his father worked as a silversmith and lectured at Glasgow School of Art. Creed […]
“Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse.” – Sir Winston Churchill Join Laing Brown, a noted art collector, Board Member and Chair of the Audain Art Museum Acquisitions Committee, for a public multi-media presentation where he will discuss his Top 10 Collecting Rules for contemporary […]
“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 […]