In the 1990s, the British-Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare had an “epiphany”, said Ben Luke in the Evening Standard. He discovered that the colourful batik fabrics sold in Brixton Market, which he had always associated with West Africa, were in fact the product of complicated historical exchanges. They were based on Indonesian textiles shipped to Europe […]
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Antony Gormley’s Time Horizon – a ‘judgmental army’ of 100 cast-iron men
Antony Gormley’s latest artwork, installed in the grounds of the stately Houghton Hall in Norfolk, is an “almost judgmental” comment on our “ever more divided world”. The London-born sculptor “used his own body to mould the sculptures” of 100 life-size figures “similar to his famous iron men on Crosby beach in Merseyside”, said the BBC. […]
Read MoreFrom Bananas as Art to Bullets: Maurizio Cattelan’s Got a Gun Show
“You should never ask an artist about their art,” Maurizio Cattelan said, immediately on arrival. “The best art raises lots and lots of questions,” he added. “Not answers.” One of today’s foremost artists, with a reputation that pervades well beyond the art world, Cattelan, 63, has a new bullet-riddled exhibition in New York that is […]
Read MoreChicago Museum Says Investigators Have No Evidence Art Was Looted
The Art Institute of Chicago has rebuffed an attempt by New York investigators to seize an Egon Schiele drawing in its collection, asserting in a strongly-worded 132-page court filing that the investigators have produced no evidence that the artwork was looted by the Nazis as they claim. The drawing, “Russian War Prisoner,” was purchased by […]
Read MoreThe Venice Biennale and the Art of Turning Backward
There is a sour tendency in cultural politics today — a growing gap between speaking about the world and acting in it. In the domain of rhetoric, everyone has grown gifted at pulling back the curtain. An elegant museum gallery is actually a record of imperial violence; a symphony orchestra is a site of elitism […]
Read MoreArchie Moore, Australian Artist, Wins Top Prize at Venice Biennale
Archie Moore, an Indigenous Australian artist who has created an installation including a monumental family tree, won the top prize at the Venice Biennale on Saturday. Moore, 54, took the Golden Lion, the prize for the best national participation at the Biennale, the world’s oldest and most high-profile international art exhibition. He beat out artists […]
Read MoreHits of the Venice Biennale
They used to call this waterlogged city the Most Serene Republic, but there is nothing serenissima about the opening days of the Venice Biennale. The world’s longest-running and most extravagant festival of contemporary art opens to the public on Saturday after a preview biathlon of fine art and financial profligacy that has grown more hectic […]
Read MoreBruegel to Rubens: a rare opportunity to see ‘outstanding’ art
Between them, Antwerp’s Museum Plantin-Moretus and the Ashmolean in Oxford own some of the most “outstanding” holdings of 16th and 17th century Flemish drawings, said Jackie Wullschläger in the FT. Including masterpieces by the likes of Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Anthony van Dyck and Peter Paul Rubens, the museums’ respective collections of these works stretch […]
Read MoreAfter 70 Years, Si Lewen’s Wrenching ‘Parade’ Marches On
At the very beginning of Si Lewen’s “The Parade,” the series of untitled antiwar works on artist’s board that forms the pulsing heart of a new exhibition curated by the cartoonist Art Spiegelman, four sketchy, ecstatic boys and girls stride into the endless possibility of unmarked white gesso. In the second panel, a family leaning […]
Read MoreA Millennial Weaver Carries a Centuries-Old Craft Forward
Spiders are weavers. The Navajo artist and weaver Melissa Cody knows this palpably. As she sits cross-legged on sheepskins at her loom, on one of the wooden platforms that boost her higher as her stack of monumental tapestries grows, the sacred knowledge of Spider Woman and Spider Man, who brought the gift of looms and […]
Read MoreKeith Haring’s Legacy Is at the Mall, Not the Museum
Toward the end of “Radiant: The Life and Line of Keith Haring,” Brad Gooch’s exhaustive new biography, he quotes from a journal entry Haring made after visiting the Museum of Modern Art in 1988 expressing his “sense of injustice” that contemporaries of his “were represented upstairs in the galleries, while he was confined to the […]
Read MoreOn the Ground at the Venice Biennale
The exhibitions have been installed. The artists have arrived. The city of Venice is prepared to welcome throngs of visitors from across the world. The 2024 Venice Biennale, featuring work by more than 330 participating artists from some 90 countries scattered throughout the city, opens to the public on Saturday. And before that come the […]
Read MoreIsraeli Artist Shuts Venice Biennale Exhibit, Calls for Cease-Fire in Gaza
Since February thousands of pro-Palestinian activists have tried in vain to get the Venice Biennale, one of the world’s most prestigious international art exhibitions, to ban Israel over its conduct of the war in Gaza. But on Tuesday, when the Biennale’s international pavilions open for a media preview, the doors to the Israel pavilion will […]
Read MoreFaith Ringgold Perfectly Captured the Pitch of America’s Madness
Faith Ringgold, who died Saturday at 93, was an artist of protean inventiveness. Painter, sculptor, weaver, performer, writer and social justice activist, she made work in which the personal and political were tightly bonded. And much of that work gained popularity among audiences that didn’t necessarily frequent galleries and museums. This was particularly true of […]
Read MoreMatch Made in Venice: Tadao Ando and Zeng Fanzhi
An American institution sponsors an exhibition by a Chinese artist in collaboration with a Japanese architect at a centuries-old Venetian building. This is the kind of far-flung constellation that can only come together during the Venice Biennale, when the historic Italian lagoon city turns into contemporary art’s grandest stage. While the Biennale itself is famed […]
Read MoreSky High Farm Takes Fashion Upstate
There are certain things the fashion industry will always love: The young and beautiful. Art and money. Nostalgia. A comeback. From time to time, it also loves to throw itself behind a cause. By those metrics, Dan Colen is giving fashion a lot to love right now. A blue-chip artist represented by the mega-gallery Gagosian, […]
Read MoreSky High Farm Takes Fashion Upstate
There are certain things the fashion industry will always love: The young and beautiful. Art and money. Nostalgia. A comeback. From time to time, it also loves to throw itself behind a cause. By those metrics, Dan Colen is giving fashion a lot to love right now. A blue-chip artist represented by the mega-gallery Gagosian, […]
Read MoreJeffrey Gibson: Representing the U.S., and Critiquing It, in a Psychedelic Rainbow
People in Venice might hear the jingle dress dancers before they see them. On April 18, some 26 intertribal Native American dancers and singers from Oklahoma and Colorado will make their way through the winding streets and canals of the Italian city. Wearing brightly colored shawls, beaded yokes and dresses decorated with the metal cones […]
Read MoreFaith Ringgold Dies at 93; Wove Black Life Into Quilts and Children’s Books
Faith Ringgold, a multimedia artist whose pictorial quilts depicting the African American experience gave rise to a second distinguished career as a writer and illustrator of children’s books, died on Saturday at her home in Englewood, N.J. She was 93. Her death was confirmed by Emily Alli, who is helping with Ms. Ringgold’s estate. For […]
Read MoreIn Nigeria’s Venice Biennale Pavilion, Criticism Meets Optimism
People in Lagos, Nigeria’s largest city, are hardly shy. The stereotype runs toward boisterousness, worn as a point of pride. But when the artist and poet Precious Okoyomon recorded interviews with some 60 city residents in January for an art project, the unusual questions — like “Who was responsible for the suffering of your mother?” […]
Read MoreForget The Naked Option, This Donkervoort F22 Wears A Painting
Forget The Naked Option, This Donkervoort F22 Wears A Painting | Carscoops <!—-><!– –><!– –><!—-><!—-> The model will be displayed in an art gallery, as the owner drives his second Donkervoort on track days April 12, 2024 at 20:18 <!––> <!– –> The livery of the Donkervoort F22 Art Edition was created by Dutch artist […]
Read MorePerth Museum – the anticipated return of the Stone of Scone
After an absence of 728 years, the Stone of Scone – aka the Stone of Destiny – has been returned to Perthshire, said Alastair Sooke in The Telegraph. It may not look like much, but for many centuries, this block of sandstone has played a key role in the coronation of monarchs – first Scottish, […]
Read MorePerth Museum and Art Gallery – the anticipated return of the Stone of Scone
After an absence of 728 years, the Stone of Scone – aka the Stone of Destiny – has been returned to Perthshire, said Alastair Sooke in The Telegraph. It may not look like much, but for many centuries, this block of sandstone has played a key role in the coronation of monarchs – first Scottish, […]
Read MoreThe Gang That Preyed on America’s Small Museums
The first burglary was in 1999 at Keystone College in Factoryville, Pa. One of the gang, authorities said, sneaked onto the campus, smashed some glass display cases and walked off with memorabilia, including a baseball jersey once worn by Christy Mathewson, the legendary pitcher. The Everhart Museum in Scranton was next, six years later. An […]
Read MoreBerlin Was a Beacon of Artistic Freedom. Gaza Changed Everything.
When the musician Laurie Anderson was beginning her career in the early 1970s, an avant-garde artist who wanted to work at scale had to go abroad — to one place in particular. “I got my start in Germany, because of state-supported art,” recalled Anderson, who exhibited at its national museums and performed with its symphony […]
Read MoreThe birth of impressionism
The 15 April 1874 has a good claim to be the founding moment of modern art. A group of 31 artists, who’d often been rejected by the official Paris Salon, had decided to stage their own show at 35 Boulevard des Capucines, a photographers’ studio. They included Claude Monet, Paul Cézanne, Edgar Degas, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, […]
Read MoreHer Art Is at Odds With Museums, and Museums Can’t Get Enough
Inside the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver, little pieces of Antarctica were melting: cross-sections of an ice core from the continent’s Newall Glacier, each one about the size of a beverage coaster and encased in a vacuum-sealed plastic bag. The artist Gala Porras-Kim watched approvingly during a visit in March, pointing out the air […]
Read MoreWhen the Rubin Museum Was Divine
A brick-and-mortar presence can be, often is, a crucial part of an art museum’s allure. The Guggenheim’s mother ship interior is such a thrill that it prepares you to love whatever’s on view. The interiors of the Frick and the Morgan are intimate enough to make you feel proprietarily, and fabulously, at home. The Rubin […]
Read MoreWhen the Rubin Museum Was Divine
A brick-and-mortar presence can be, often is, a crucial part of an art museum’s allure. The Guggenheim’s mother ship interior is such a thrill that it prepares you to love whatever’s on view. The interiors of the Frick and the Morgan are intimate enough to make you feel proprietarily, and fabulously, at home. The Rubin […]
Read MoreFrancesca Woodman and Julia Margaret Cameron: experimental portrait photography
“Just over 100 years separate the creative lives of Julia Margaret Cameron and Francesca Woodman,” said Sean O’Hagan in The Observer. The former was English, “a Victorian pioneer of imaginative photographic portraiture”; the latter a 20th century American photographer who made “performative and mysteriously elusive self-portraits”. Cameron (1815-1879) came late to photography, in her 50s; […]
Read MoreFor Sale: One Huge Drawing, Maybe by Michelangelo
For half a century, the Sernesi family lived in a storied villa overlooking Florence, in which the Renaissance artist Michelangelo was raised and later owned. The property came with several buildings, an orchard and a drawing of a muscular male nude etched on the wall of a former kitchen. Tradition has it that the work […]
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