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 […]
Public art often gets scarred by battles over its meaning or right to exist, but the vandals who daubed antisemitic graffiti on his sculpture are idiots who picked the wrong target. Anish Kapoor, it turns out, is not only a brilliant artist but a brave one. Faced with an antisemitic attack on his open-air sculpture […]
Sculpture officially called ‘Dirty Corner’, in Palace of Versailles gardens, was attacked in June then cleaned but this time graffiti will stay ‘to bear witness’. A controversial sculpture by artist Anish Kapoor, on display in the gardens of the Palace of Versailles – and informally dubbed the “queen’s vagina” – was vandalised again on Sunday, […]
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 […]
James Turrell’s work is as instantly recognizable as it is undefinable, existing somewhere between land art, light art, sculpture, and installation. Turrell has been exploring the nature of light and space since the 1960s, and in that time has created works all over the world from Yucatan to Japan, not to mention his yet-unfinished opus […]
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 […]
Bruce Nauman is considered a towering and influential figure in postwar American art. His reputation as a master of minimalist and conceptual art was cemented more than four decades ago when he was first showing with Leo Castelli in New York and in important European shows like “When Attitudes Become Form,” at the Kunsthalle Bern […]
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 […]
In a 1967 Artforum article titled “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art,” the artist Sol LeWitt gave a simple definition for what would soon become one of the crucial facets of contemporary art in the 20th century and beyond. “In conceptual art,” he writes, “the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work….The idea […]
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. […]
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, […]
Throughout his prolific career Byars pursued with tireless curiosity his life-long obsessions with ideal form and a personalized notion of “perfect”. Death and the eternal are related concepts Byars explored in several important performances and sculptures. These recurrent themes are given particularly poignant expression in the works on view at Michael Werner. The Figure of […]
The common refrain, “It’s the journey, not the destination,” could make a perfect catchphrase for Process Art. A movement that arose in the 1960s and ’70s and has since expanded in definition to describe a general philosophical approach to making art, Process Art places its emphasis on the process and act of artistic creation rather than the […]
Brunelleschi’s Dome, the architectural marvel that is in Florence’s Piazza del Duomo, may be one of the most breathtaking sights you’ll ever encounter. Staging an art exhibition that can successfully compete with a view of that iconic building is a tall order, but Antony Gormley‘s current show, “Human” is up to the challenge. Perched on a hill overlooking […]