At its very core, the intrinsic value of art—which can be disruptive, unpredictable, and at the very least challenging—has tremendous transformative and healing incentives. Whether it occurs at the first encounter or over time, the implications for the viewer, be they formal or emotional, are simultaneously simple and complex, generous...

What do I do now?' the late Betty Woodman – who passed away last year – wondered, at 75, when her 2006 retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art had closed.

A cast bronze sculpture of a commanding figure enthroned like an Egyptian pharaoh greeted visitors to Huma Bhabha's midcareer survey, They Live. The figure's body—originally modeled in chicken wire, polystyrene foam packing blocks, and wood—had a damaged, incomplete look to it, while the bronze gave it an aura of enduring power.

Jonas Wood's East Hollywood studio — a refurbished industrial space hidden behind a razor-wired metal gate — is populated with the familiar objects that appear in his paintings. There are colonies of potted plants and basketball paraphernalia that ranges in size from plush couch cushions to man-sized orbs. Every room is filled with art,...

A child painting their own face. Tropical plants. Basketballs. Milk crates. More basketballs. These are just some of the banal exotica that appear in the work of Jonas Wood. By now, you're just as likely to see the Los Angeles-based painter's work on Instagram as you are in a white-walled gallery, a major museum, on the shelf at Dover Street...

In his photographs of sun-filled Los Angeles interiors or flora-dense backyards, Norwegian-born artist Torbjørn Rødland flirts with his viewer by contrasting clinical level hygiene with elements of contamination and excess. At first, seductive models of irresistible charm engage with fetishized objects or one another amid desirably impeccable...

HULL, UK — Across the northeast industrial city of Hull, first-time host to this year's Turner Prize exhibition, a clever billboard marketing campaign declares, 'Whatever you think about Turner Prize 2017, you're right.' Nodding to the spectrum of critique the Prize attracts as an annual showcase for 'emerging' British talent, the Prize is...

The photographs of Torbjørn Rødland never quite resolve, but they are arresting in their uncertainty. The Los Angeles-based Norwegian artist uses analogue photography and (mostly) staged scenes to construct images that don't provide any straightforward information about the world depicted, yet also evade the neatness of metaphor.Rødland is deeply...

On November 1, 2017, The Museum of Contemporary Art held a luncheon honoring Lillian Lovelace and Tala Madani. Lovelace and Madani were celebrated for their extraordinary talents and contributions to the arts.

In the art world I thought I knew, no one would publicly admit to an interest in golf, least of all a young painter who was just making his name. But that is exactly what Jonas Wood did, a decade ago, when he made a painting of the golf course in Glendale where he was learning to play. Now, 10 years later, he is revisiting the subject in his latest...

This year's Turner Prize exhibition, which is taking place in Hull's Ferens Art Gallery, is a quieter affair than the showcase at Tate Britain in 2016. There are no headline-grabbing images to match Anthea Hamilton's giant buttocks or Michael Dean's sea of coins from last year. Instead, ideas about rootlessness and belonging, states of limbo and...

'I am not interested in randomness, I am interested in constellations witha link to the human psyche. Hopefully because of this, the images will staywith the viewer a little longer than just being registered as surrealist compositions.'Torbjørn Rødland is known for his portraits, still lives and landscape, in which simultaneously inhabits and...

What was the touch that made you? A kiss under streetlights at 2am? The squeeze of a friend's hand? The shivering collision of your parents? The jagged pain of blood being pulled from a vein? Our lives revolve around touch: who we touch; what we touch; how we touch; what touches us; who touches us. For Norwegian photographer Torbjørn Rødland it was...

'We are drinking beer, right? Because I'm celebrating,' Lesley Vance says to me when I arrive at her house in the Laurel Canyon neighborhood of Los Angeles. It is a Sunday afternoon and she is relieved to have finished a body of work to send to her gallery. 'I didn't prepare a whole meal like Terry Winters did for you!' she laughs — a...

'Just as museums of Europe must now be littered with Neo-Expressionist "monstrosities", so too might there be in ten years' time a little patch of Grunge, fouling up the air in the back lots of public collections across Australia,' Jeff Gibson wrote in his 1993 essay Avant-Grunge.

Recently, the Iranian-American artist Tala Madani was sitting in her studio in Los Angeles, tweaking a video in progress. It featured a young girl wearing a bow in her hair and a yellow-gold cardigan, her legs akimbo in a pose that conjured Courbet's "The Origin of the World."

Given the current political climate, we here at frieze have been reflecting on the role of art in responding to conflict. With this in mind, we invited a cross-section of artists, curators and writers to answer two deceptively simple questions: ‘How important is art as a form of protest?’ and ‘How effective is it as a conduit of change?’ Responses...

A recreation of a protective deity destroyed by Islamic State and a sculpture of a scoop of ice cream topped with a drone have been shortlisted for Trafalgar Square’s Fourth Plinth.Organisers have now unveiled maquettes of the proposed works, which also include a white robe, to sit on the Fourth Plinth in 2018 and 2020.One of the proposed...

The unveiling at the National Gallery, London, of the five proposals for the next two commissions to fill the vacant plinth in Trafalgar Square presents a typically broad and stimulating range of ideas from global contemporary artists. But it also marks a significant shift in the response to the Fourth Plinth phenomenon at the gallery, on whose...

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Men are dogs, but their shit grows into trees and their urine forms the sun as they defecate themselves in Tala Madani's oil paintings.

The exhibition Model Malady explores contemporary bodily states of fetishization, subversion and ridicule while using video and sculpture as means of defining what a body can be.One part of the space is filled with plaster blocks stylized as faux marble pedestals “resting” on metal racks akin to chairs. Opposite, there is a...

Frank Lloyd Wright once remarked, ‘Tip the world over on its side and everything loose will land in Los Angeles.’ That type of impermanence could easily sum up the provisional quality of most thematic museum surveys, which is why curators Hamza Walker and Aram Moshayedi immediately decided to eschew any notion of theme for a series of...

'Go ahead; you can write whatever you want about me,' Jonas Wood says. 'Everyone knows I'm a stoner,' he adds, since beer has been mostly displaced by California's drug of choice during my Los Angeles series of interviews. It becomes clear that what's precious to Wood — more than words — are images. He checks what I am photographing,...

With no apparent fronts or backs, the forms in Lesley Vance’s paintings are slippery as Möbius strips. Edge becomes plane, plane dissolves. Broad ribbons fold over and peel away. Inner elides into outer, outer into inner. Bulges flatten, and flat planes swell. The impenetrable turns permeable before dissipating entirely.