The cover photograph for the informative catalogue that accompanies this dazzling show was taken by Hans Namuth and catches Robert Motherwell and Helen Frankenthaler at their wedding lunch on April 6, 1958. Her look is all love; Motherwell, averting his gaze from Namuth, has a vacant, slightly ironic expression. Was it because he'd already been...
Benaam, 'without name,' was always for me a monument to the unnamed victims of ongoing conflict. The black covering is literally a plastic bag covering a body that has expired. The hands stretching out from under the plastic signal a last movement, as does the refuse or tail of rubble—a final expulsion. We Come in Peace, which is also the title...
There isn’t a traditional formula. A lot of times something good happens that makes me realise other things should have happened first. Almost like I built the top floor before the foundation. I have a few formulas that work consistently for me. For example, if I want to make flesh, I have a cold version and a warm version that I know how to make....
I was a little bit empty. When I kept finding myself lost, John would say, 'Let's go to the Strand bookstore together.' I remember focusing on the first image I saw in a rococo-period book, which was a Mars and Venus porcelain by Royal Derbyshire. After seeing that I made a small sculpture called Waterfall [2001]. I included it in a show and my...
The argument between drawing (line and contour) and painting (color and light) goes back to the Renaissance and what some believe is the first great culmination of Western painting. In Lives of the Artists (1550), the Florentine writer and artist Giorgio Vasari emphasized the importance of disegno (drawing and design) as the foundation upon...
Gursky 's signature accomplishment as an artist is his ability to estrange his image from normal perception. Ocean III (2010) asks viewers to assume the nearly impossible position of comprehending the macrocosmic, while Untitled III (2002) immerses them in a microcosmic viewpoint. These distinctions can also be expressed in contrasting terms...
Like the museum, Simon catalogues objects and information under specific organising principles: symmetry, crispness of detail, and refined, minimal installation. Through this highly careful mode of tracing, depicting, and presenting, she both mirrors the systems she sets out to examine and surpasses them in her rigorous application of their...
'The breasts and distended abdomen were made with the help of three water pitchers; the belly from a portion of a large one, and the breasts from two small ones, all picked up from the scrap heap. The rest was modeled. The fact that the figure was only about half the normal size gave it a grotesque appearance. It had almost no feet, it swayed...
Ruby gives shape and body to images that are otherwise virtual and in any case always mediated by electronic devices. The corporal and tactile theme permeates another series of works, crucial in the corpus of work by Ruby, the famous soft sculptures. Giant anthropomorphic figures of which Laying Figure (2013) is possibly the most emblematic...
For MOCA's facade, Wood proposed a version of his Still Life with Two Owls (2014), a complex canvas first exhibited in 2015 at Gagosian Hong Kong in a joint show with the Japanese-born ceramic artist Shio Kusaka, whom Wood is married to and whose pots appear in the painting. (The two have another joint show at the Voorlinden Museum in the...
We are in Anselm Kiefer 's studio outside Paris on a hot day in September 2016, looking at some of the works to appear in his forthcoming exhibition at Gagosian, Transition from Cool to Warm. A few books rest on tables in the library, a long and airy section of the upper floor. The pages in the largest of the books are bigger than A1 paper...
A man and a woman in cocktail attire talk near the wall of paintings. There is tension: he gestures with both hands, making a point, as she looks away into a mirror. Tansey 's paintings are monochromatic, his way of separating borrowed images from their sources and integrating them into a new unity; Reverb is in shades of Prussian blue, the...
Writing about the image of woman in Saville 's nudes, Maria Becker suggests that 'The feeling they leave the viewer with is borne of an understanding of what it means to be a body.' This ability to get inside her subjects is one of Saville's strengths. Her new life-size drawings of intertwined bodies, with their erotic undertones, have a...
Richard Wright is best known for his rigorous site-specific yet transient works that unite painting with graphic, typographic, and ornamental elements. Actively engaging the laws of visual perspective, he charges architectural spaces with a fourth dimension of subtle yet extreme optical complexity, subverting the static exchange between painting...
Sinuous sculptures crafted from steel, post-WWII abstract paintings and celebrity portraits by Annie Leibovitz are just a few of the highlights of this month's exhibitions
Anish Kapoor, Louise Bourgeois, Rachel Whiteread, Gerhard Richter. These may not be names that spring to mind when you think of the British Museum, but they all have work filed away in its extensive archive of prints and drawings. 'Pushing Paper: Contemporary Drawing from 1970 to Now' lifts a lid on a lesser-known collection at a museum renowned...
Lunchbreak (1989) is the first thing the eye rests on as one enters I Don't Like Fiction, I Like History. A diorama of three Floridian white men in repose, it's unusual, for a Hanson, in that it contains multiple figures and some large props—the scaffolding and trestles. Hanson's subjects are typically solitary, accompanied by objects...
In 1974, Chris Burden released his Deluxe Photo Book 1971-73, a self-published catalogue of twenty-three early performances represented by concise narrative descriptions of the works coupled with black-and-white documentary photographs. Considering it both an independent art object and a record of his early generative work, Burden created the...
On a January afternoon in his studio, thinking about what it means to paint such familiar faces, Kami explained, 'When I know a person very well, I want [the portrait] to look very much like the experience I have of that face, which is a constant experience. This is more of a challenge with a face that I know well than with someone who is more...
PITTSBURGH — That Andy Warhol was a lifelong practicing Byzantine (i.e. Eastern) Catholic is not a secret. At least one book is devoted to his religious concerns. His biographers and some critics note that most of the women and men in the Factory were lapsed believers. And he made paintings, especially late in life, with explicit Christian...
In the autumn of 1961, performance artist Allan Kaprow arranged a meeting between Roy Lichtenstein and Ivan Karp, director of the influential Leo Castelli Gallery in New York. The purpose of the meeting was to show Karp four of the new 'comic book paintings' that Lichtenstein had recently made. The paintings, The Engagement Ring (1961), Girl...
A decade ago, when Robert Therrien first showed a folding card-table whose top soared high above our heads, with four folding chairs scaled to match, I think many viewers read them as props from the latest sequel to Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. After all, Therrien has long worked in Tinseltown, so reading his objects in terms of spectacle and...
In her recent shift toward performance, large-scale installation, and sound, Simon raises new questions about the role of the living, breathing body as an agent within the increasingly pervasive, even ritualised photographic technologies of the past decade. In An Occupation of Loss, which had its second iteration in London in April 2018, she...
The cover of the Artnews of May 1980 shows a smiling face, with superintelligent eyes, under a somewhat unruly crop of dark hair. In a black sweater covering a blue workman's shirt, collar just showing, the artist Arakawa, known only by his last name, points a pencil toward the viewer, his other hand pressing down on a messy stack of papers....
