Tag: Art

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. […]

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From 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 […]

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Chicago 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 […]

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The 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 […]

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Archie 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 […]

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Hits 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 […]

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Bruegel 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 […]

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After 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 […]

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A 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 […]

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Keith 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 […]

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Israeli 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 […]

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Faith 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 […]

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Match 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 […]

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Sky 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, […]

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Sky 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, […]

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Jeffrey 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 […]

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Faith 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 […]

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In 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?” […]

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The 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 […]

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Berlin 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 […]

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The 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, […]

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Her 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 […]

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When 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 […]

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When 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 […]

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Francesca 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; […]

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For 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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