LOS ANGELES — Not long ago, Jasper Johns, who is now 87 and widely regarded as America’s foremost living artist, was reminiscing about his childhood in small-town South Carolina. One day when he was in the second grade, a classmate named Lottie Lou Oswald misbehaved and was summoned to the front of the room. As […]
Learn why the colour signifies home, earth and motherhood for this remarkable sculptor. While some colours may trigger a wide variety of responses in viewers, red – the colour of human injury – is perhaps the one pigment that almost all of us respond to in the same way. And nowhere is that response more […]
Royal Academy, London Dance marathons, dustbowl farms, brawling sailors, impoverished cotton-pickers … Adrian Searle takes a journey through 1930s America in a gripping show. The sedan careers up the hill on a country road, slewing as a truck comes over the rise. We have a death’s-eye view, watching it happen. Everything slows down – a […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
It’s hard to believe, but the year is almost over. Another 12 months have whizzed past us, with their usual load of openings, exhibitions, biennales, and art fairs. In this article artnet news goes down memory lane to remember some of the best exhibitions that took place in Europe in 2015, in no particular order.
“Ai’s trees are made from parts of dead trees that are brought down from the mountains of southern China and sold in the markets of Jingdezhen, Jiangxi province. Ai transports these to his studio in Beijing where they are made into trees. As he says, “it’s just like trying to imagine what the tree looked […]
The Royal Academy of Arts is currently presenting a landmark exhibition of the Honorary Royal Academician, Ai Weiwei. Although Ai is one of China’s leading contemporary artists, his work has not been seen extensively in Britain and the Royal Academy is presenting the first major institutional survey of his artistic output. The exhibition includes significant […]
The Royal Academy of Arts will present a landmark exhibition of the Honorary Royal Academician, Ai Weiwei. Although Ai is one of China’s leading contemporary artists, his work has not been seen extensively in Britain and the Royal Academy will present the first major institutional survey of his artistic output. The exhibition will include significant […]
If there were any who doubted Ai Weiwei’s work matched his reputation, this rollercoaster of a show – racing between his time in jail, the Sichuan earthquake and 3,000 crabs – should silence them. Three-thousand porcelain river crabs clamber over one another in a great red, green and white sprawl of twitching legs and claws. […]
Three-thousand porcelain river crabs clamber over one another in a great red, green and white sprawl of twitching legs and claws. Porcelain sunflower seeds are one thing, crabs another. Good thing they’re not quite real. This is but one small moment in the largest show Ai Weiwei has held in Britain. Not exactly a retrospective, […]
Having settled in at the RA, Marlow is about to launch his first major exhibition: the work of Ai Weiwei, the Chinese dissident artist who was imprisoned without charge in 2011 and released on condition that he should give up his passport. A thorn in the Chinese government’s side for two decades, he has made […]
On Wednesday morning, Chinese artist and prominent dissident Ai Weiwei announced via an Instagram post that Chinese authorities have returned his passport. “Today I got my passport” his Instagram caption read. “Ai Weiwei and his many supporters around the world are thrilled at the news that his passport has been returned after 600 days,” Ossian Ward from Lisson Gallery, […]
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 […]
A brilliant painter derailed by an unfortunate obsession. There’s no escaping it; Hat Stand, 1969, is a beastly object. The blank-faced mannequin is too literal to succeed as a sculpture, and the conceit is too nasty to be ignored. Her position – holding up her hands to receive our hats – recalls the torture meted […]
There are many sides to the work of the German artist Anselm Kiefer. Those lucky enough to visit his studio complex at Barjac in the South of France encounter a staggering array of installations, underground tunnels, and tottering concrete towers resembling some contemporary equivalent to the fortifications of medieval Tuscany. But wisely, the Royal Academy […]
Anselm Kiefer in Conversation before Kiefer’s major retrospective at the Royal Academy in London, with the new Director of the RA, Tim Marlow. This is only the third time that one artist has taken over the whole of the Royal Academy, the other two being David Hockney and Anish Kapoor – we can’t wait to […]
Kiefer uses a vast panoply of materials in his art, each of which have intricate symbolic meanings. Studiously parsed, they trigger a kind of spiritual-historical giddiness. There is the straw, for instance, that symbolises the hair of the German prison guard Margarethe in Paul Celan’s poem “Death Fugue.” There are the seven flames that represent […]
Royal Academy, London Anselm Kiefer’s monumental work in ash, straw, diamonds and sunflowers dazzles in a superb retrospective. Only with the help of a blindfold would you be able to wander theRoyal Academy’s stupendous retrospective of his work and leave feeling anything less than drunk with amazement. However much you know about Kiefer, it’s impossible […]