Has much changed since Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain? The art world is no stranger to the gasp-inducing project or performance: in fact, it seems at times to thrive on it. In these dog days of summer, when the art world slows down and the tumbleweeds approach Chelsea, we’re excited to hear that provocative exhibitions are still […]
Anish Kapoor has the exclusive rights to paint using Vantablack, the blackest black that has ever existed – but other artists are keen to use it. Colour is precious. Colour can drive you mad – especially if you are an artist. The colours that artists use can be as expensive as gold – which installationist […]
While the lone wolf artist has long been romanticized for its singular (if not god-given) genius, the creative duo has also, many times over, recast the shape of art. Below, we explore seven of art history’s game-changing partnerships during the 20th century. For these pioneering artists—from Christo and Jeanne-Claude to Marina Abramovic & Ulay—collaboration was […]
THE sculptor Richard Serra, a stickler about the differences between art and architecture, once described most public sculpture in urban architectural settings as “displaced, homeless, overblown objects that say, ‘We represent modern art.’” For most of the last century, residential and commercial developments in New York City tended to marry architecture and art with that […]
Antony Gormley says his first White Cube exhibition in four years, which opens in September, is driven by “more of a sense of urgency” than any other show he has done. From the warming of our climate and the acidification of our seas to cities dominated by skyscrapers – “nothing more than expressions of virile […]
For his first show at Hauser & Wirth, which opened Wednesday, June 29, Mexico City- and London-based artist Stefan Brüggemann covered the walls of the first floor of the gallery’s Upper-East-Side outpost with spray-painted scareheads ripped from recent news stories and quotes culled from classic films. Part of his ongoing “Headlines and Last Line in […]
The Floating Piers on Lake Iseo in Sulzano, Italy The first work by Bulgarian artist Christo in more than a decade is seemingly miraculous; three kilometres of shimmering marigold walkways floating atop Italy’s Lake Iseo, giving visitors the power to walk on water. First conceived in 1970 by Christo and Jeanne-Claude – his partner in life and […]
The haunting work titled CHILD goes on show in New York after two decades away from the public eye. Conservators at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York have done the seemingly impossible: they have brought Bruce Conner’s CHILD (1959-60), a haunting sculpture of a gas chamber execution, back from the dead ahead […]
This week saw the first post-Brexit art auctions in London, and they brought considerable cheer to a market predominantly dismayed at the Leave decision. To a backdrop of a declining exchange rate for the pound and Britain losing its AAA rating status, on Monday Phillips turned in a modest total of £9.8m hammer (£11.9m with […]
LONDON — The day began in the Turbine Hall, the 85-foot-tall atrium at the heart of Tate Modern, the most visited museum of modern and contemporary art in the world. If the museum functions like a medieval cathedral — as the Lord Browne of Madingley, chairman of Tate’s Board of Trustees, suggested in a packet […]
Everything is fair game for the Turner Prize-winning artist in a new show at the Park Avenue Armory. The Turner Prize-winning British artist is known for his singular (sometimes gross) sense of humor, sparking debate with seemingly mundane, Duchampian conceptual actions and for nabbing Britain’s coveted Turner Prize by rigging a light switch with a timer. […]
A kind of extended happening, or maybe a series of short ones, has gently taken over the Park Avenue Armory, one of the architectural gems of New York. Numerous moving parts, animate and inanimate, are involved, and they are all the doing of the British maverick Martin Creed, the first artist to be given the […]
The Armory’s 55,000-square-foot central room must make artists who are commissioned to create work there break out in night sweats. Creed’s principal intervention in it, Shutters Opening and Closing (2016), is sure to make them jealous. The darkened hall is nearly empty. The rolling garage door at the back of the space, which looks out […]
Although he can come across as almost pathologically ill at ease and underprepared, the artist is clearly not lacking in confidence. The Armory’s largest space is its drill hall, which actually earns the overused adjective cavernous. Instead of cluttering it with whimsies, Creed has installed a single huge projection of a new work: a music-video-slick […]
“It’s pretty remarkable the armory is letting us do this,” observed Mr. Eccles, who assembled the exhibition in partnership with Hans-Ulrich Obrist, artistic director of the Serpentine Galleries in London. Actually, the exhibition is in the spirit of earlier armory shows spotlighting off-center artists like Paul McCarthy and Christian Boltanski — both of which Mr. […]
When the new 10-story museum opens June 17, it will boast a huge performance space, rooftop terrace and more geographically diverse collection. In a year of glitzy museum openings, from New York’s Met Breuer to San Francisco’s sleek SF MoMA, London’s Tate Modern is upping the ante. On June 17, the museum will open the […]
Photographed, then subsequently thrown away, by Alfred Stieglitz, urinated on by Brian Eno and sometimes cited as the work of a Bauhaus baroness rather than the man it is most commonly associated with, Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain is arguably the first piece of conceptual art ever, certainly the most famous ready made in art history, and has inspired […]
Discover how a generation of artists swapped pencils for dumper trucks as they made the world their canvas. In the summer of 1967, while hitchhiking his way from St Martin’s School of Art to his home city of Bristol, the British art student Richard Long stopped in a field in Wiltshire, and walked repeatedly in […]
“I remember going to a gallery opening and hearing people say ‘Andy is here, Andy is here,’ and suddenly I saw him through the crowd,” Mr. Ai recalled this week, walking through “Andy Warhol/Ai Weiwei” at the Warhol Museum here. “It was incredible to be in the same room, but I was a nobody.” In […]
I meet Martin Creed more than a week before his retrospective What’s the point of it? opens at the Hayward. The gallery is full of 25 years’ worth of improbable, witty, uplifting art; I am especially gladdened by a wall covered in 1,000 prints of broccoli. But the show is not ready yet: the atmosphere […]