Voyeurism is, for many artists, a necessary part of the creative process. But some take the act of watching the unaware a step further, into surveillance or espionage. As the 2011 SF MoMA and Tate Modern show “Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance, and the Camera Since 1870” reminded us, these activities have been going on in art […]
Rodney Graham works across various disciplines including photography, film, performance and sculpture and is often associated with the Vancouver School. The diversity of the mediums he uses is also reflected in the multiple cultural, historical, literary and philosophic references he layers within his work. Watch the TateShots Video.
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 […]
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 […]
The year hasn’t been short of blockbuster surveys and brilliantly curated displays, as well as smaller, more focused surveys that have been unjustly overlooked but which have proved quietly groundbreaking in their own way. The best exhibitions, which are not, of course, always the ones with the biggest fanfare, nor even the best loans, usually […]
Cubism is famous for its difficulty, and the fact that in the early years of its development, Picasso and Braque treated it as a secret, denying its existence to outsiders. It’s very brown, it’s visually severe, it’s hard to enter. What, exactly, was Cubism? I think Cubism has been seen as an intellectual art form […]
Has the Turner prize lost its power to shock? No – thanks to James Richards’s sphincter shots. But it’s Tris Vonna-Michell’s spellbinding spoken-word travelogues that deserve to win. What a heartening way to celebrate 30 years of the Turner prize. People are always saying the Turner, which shocked the nation with Tracey Emin’s unmade bed […]
A holdover from the days of the French salon system, art awards provide distinguished organizations—museums, government bodies, corporations, philanthropic groups—with a way to honor the outstanding artistic talent of the day (and to burnish their own reputations in the process). With Grand Rapids’s headline-grabbing Artprize on the horizon, we’ve assembled a glossary of the world’s […]
PARIS — One cloudy afternoon this month, the line to enter the Louvre stretched around the entrance pyramid, across one long courtyard and into the next. Inside the museum, a crowd more than a dozen deep faced the Mona Lisa, most taking cellphone pictures and selfies. Near the “Winged Victory of Samothrace,” Jean-Michel Borda, visiting […]
At the heart of Kazimir Malevich’s art is a statement so final that everything else orbits it. Emphatic, plain and declarative, his Black Square has a modest, expressionless presence. It seems like a last word. But what was it? An abstract icon? A tombstone for pictorial art? The portrait of an idea? Or a thing in itself? Perhaps not […]
Rosie Rockel introduces Tate Modern’s dazzling new exhibition, which charts the career of the radical Russian artist. Watch the Video on YouTube.
Untouched since the day she died, Louise Bourgeois’ New York home-cum-studio offers an intimate portrait of the artist. At 13ft wide, the townhouse in New York that was both home and studio to Louise Bourgeois is almost as tiny as the artist herself. It was here, on the site of an old apple orchard, half […]
The Swiss architecture firm Herzog & de Meuron – among the world’s leading designers – has been selected to design a new Vancouver Art Gallery. The firm will have two themes: building for art, and making downtown work better. HdM, which designed Beijing’s Bird’s Nest Olympic stadium and London’s Tate Modern gallery, beat four other […]
The Doctor travels through time to bring us the story of Surrealism Need some help getting to grips with Surrealism? The Doctor will see you now. Peter Capaldi, a former art student, and the latest actor to play Doctor Who, settles down on Freud’s couch to deliver his wry take on the Surrealist movement.
Bees swarm, swallows swerve, a shark swims the wall … with a pair of giant dress-making scissors, Matisse cut himself free from the miseries of illness and old age, creating luscious cut-outs that unleashed a new art. Adrian Searle eats up a joyous show at Tate Modern. Scissors, paper, pins – these were all it […]
A joyous celebration of ad hoc creativity fills the Duveen Galleries. The revamping of Tate Britain has produced such an atmosphere of understated elegance that one hardly dares breathe for fear of displacing a particle of dust. An air of suffocating sterility has seeped into the displays, which are so tastefully arranged that even the […]
One great rock duo – the Kills’ Alison Mosshart and Jamie Hince – explore the greatest duos in art. Featuring double-acts such as Gilbert and George, Jake and Dinos Chapman, Marina Abramovic and Ulay, and Lucian Freud and Leigh Bowery, they examine this most intense bond as part of the Tate Unlock Art series. Watch […]
Browsing the International Art Market. From Tutankhamun to the ancient Greeks, the church to the Medicis, there’s a long history of shopping for art. Comedian Sally Phillips explains the bulk-buys and the beheadings – then explores the international art fair circuit to find out what’s worth its weight in gold … and why Tate bought […]
Television presenter and writer Dawn O’Porter takes us on a whistle-stop tour of nudity in art, from its origins 25,000 years ago to the present day With an unflinching gaze, O’Porter tackles the ever-changing rules of acceptability for representing and beholding flesh in art. Watch the Video!
A widely respected tastemaker in the contemporary art scene, the New York dealer Stefania Bortolami cut her teeth with Anthony d’Offay, a legendary London dealer known for his connoisseurial eye in both art—after closing his gallery in 2001, he donated his $140 million collection to the Tate and theNational Galleries of Scotland—and in budding star gallerists. Moving afterwards to Gagosian Gallery, […]