The 58th edition of the Venice Biennale, May You Live in Interesting Times curated by Ralph Rugoff–from London’s very own Hayward Gallery–proves to be as interesting as its title promises. Venice is an easy city to get lost in, and it’s easy to see why Proust dubbed the city’s labyrinth of alleyways a network of 'innumerable slender capillary...

There are hundreds of exhibitions in Venice during the Biennale. Alongside the main exhibition in the Giardini and Arsenale, there are 90 national presentations, many in nearby pavilions in the Giardini and in spaces around the Arsenale, but also dotted throughout Venice. Then there are the official collateral exhibitions in museums and galleries,...

While critics have argued that Richard Artschwager was an artist whose works alternated between Pop, Minimalism, and Conceptual Art, there was little doubt he possessed his own singularity removed from the fray. Whether he chose to work with bewildering banal subject matter or media references to sex and violence, Artschwager maintained the...

Jeff Koons is back. The American artist and art commerce kingpin has just opened his latest show at Oxford's Ashmolean, the world's oldest public museum. Seventeen significant works – 14 of which make their first appearance on UK soil – span the artist's career and radically distinctive oeuvre including Equilibrium, Antiquity and Gazing Ball in a...

The first image to greet the visitor at the entrance to this exhibition, arranged across three galleries in Oxford's Ashmolean Museum, is a life-sized photo portrait of Jeff Koons in his New York studio. Standing on a plinth, he gazes out at the viewer, one hand holding a deep-blue glass sphere that, like the mirror in the 'Arnolfini Portrait',...

Somewhere in a maze of picket fences, golf greens and lakes, Vero Beach's The Gallery at Windsor is a remote haven for British art world patricians. It's currently two years into a partnership with London's Royal Academy of Arts, which annually brings a celebrated artist to the Atlantic coastline to exhibit.

In November 2018, Perrotin debuted its fourth gallery in Asia in the heart of Shanghai. The space was inaugurated with the exhibition Takashi Murakami in Wonderland, on view through January 5.Just after the opening, Whitewall caught up with the woman behind the new location, Etsuko Nakajima.

Emerging in an early-1970s Viennese art scene dominated by the legacy of the Wiener Gruppe and the meteoric rise of the Actionists, Franz West, unsurprisingly, was a loner for much of his career. A great believer in the potency of pleasure, he approached artmaking with a playful, mind-drifting everydayness, fusing it with social functionality –...

Three decades after Andy Warhol's death, he remains one of America's most provocative artists. His influence on popular culture is so pervasive that each emerging art movement after him has had to grapple with Warhol's focus on surface perfections and his singular celebrity. Despite their complicated feelings, many contemporary artists say they...

Portraiture is an enduring art form, thanks to the narcissistic tendencies of the human race.

About a dozen extra trees stand in Yorkshire Sculpture Park. Conspicuously tall and bald of leaves, their presence marks the arrival of Giuseppe Penone (b. 1947), a long-term admirer of this landscape.

Bruce Nauman, 'Disappearing Acts'Schaulager17 March – 26 AugustThe Schaulager enjoys immense resources; its founder, Maja Oeri, a trustee of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and a major donor to its collection, is honoured with a MoMA gallery in her name. Bruce Nauman's detailed survey exhibition, created in collaboration with that New York...

Many of the art spaces in early '90s Berlin were located in vacant, abandoned, often ruined buildings that artists had taken over. Artists were running studio collectives and co-ops, outfitting surprising storefronts, and creating nightclubs and music programs. One very influential artist for me was Daniel Pflumm, who was organizing the...

When I was a teenager, I was obsessed with pornography. Not the PornHub or RedTube variety, but rather the naked flesh that I realized could be found in the most innocuous of places. I collected prostitute cards from phone boxes around London and stared up at the sticky top-shelf mags in the local newsagent. I photographed close-ups of breasts and...

Enthusiasm, delight and 'how are you going to do that?': these are common reactions to Taryn Simon's planned commission at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (Mass Moca) in North Adams, says its curator, Allie Foradas.

Think of the Italian artist Giuseppe Penone and trees will no doubt spring to mind. Penone has been shaping and engaging with natural forms and materials for almost 50 years, working with timber, stone, water and even vegetables.

Shortly before entering Andreas Gursky's latest retrospective which is installed in the Hayward Gallery's renovated digs, my phone buzzes with news from the World Economic Forum in Davos. There, US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin has made an offhand comment. It was nothing much: 'The dollar is one of the most liquid markets,' he stated. 'A weaker...

'How can a sentient person of the modern age mistake photography for reality?' asks the photographer Sally Mann in her memoir Hold Still. 'Photographs economize the truth; they are always moments more or less illusorily abducted from time's continuum.' Mann's slightly exasperated remarks suggest the irony in Immediate Family, the title of the book...

It seems that Vancouver has been rather superflattened by the arrival of Takashi Murakami – or at the very least supercharged. The Japanese international art world star arrived in town to open his retrospective exhibition The Octopus Eats Its Own Leg, on the eve of his 56th birthday, to a palpable civic buzz. He was even presented with a special...

Thomas Houseago's drawing studio, in the Frogtown neighborhood of Los Angeles, is smartly outfitted with plywood bookshelves, comfortable couches, and a low table perennially laid out with a stainless steel carafe of hot water, a bamboo whisk, and an assortment of matcha tea bowls. It's a contemplative domestic scene set against an exhilarating...

In Andreas Gursky's Mülheim, Anglers (1989), hobby fishermen gather on the banks of the river Ruhr. As verdant forest collapses into the curl of the water, the epic romance is broken by the emergence of the Autobahn in the distance. Part of Gursky's 68-work retrospective at the newly reopened Hayward Gallery in London's Southbank Centre, it is as...

METZ, France — French and Japanese flags flap in tandem at the Pompidou Center here, hailing the fall program at this sister venue of the Paris museum of contemporary art. Its exhibitions include one about Japanese architecture from 1945 to the present day, and the recently opened Japanorama, a survey of Japan's contemporary art since 1970,...

In a 2000 interview with the Japanese photographer Mako Wakasa for the Journal of Contemporary Art, the artist Takashi Murakami presented the following rules for survival and success in the contemporary art market (best exemplified, he said, by Damien Hirst and the continued relevance of Picasso and Warhol): "First of all, distinctively...

Urs Fischer came to public prominence in 2011 when he melted a full-size wax replica of Giambologna's Rape of the Sabine Woman at the 50th Venice Biennale. Giambologna's tour-de-force has stood in the Loggia dei Lanzi of the Piazza della Signoria in Florence since 1583, and today the acclaimed Swiss artist returned to this theatre of art and...