The authority of Francis Bacon’s art is papal. I am not referring to the paintings inspired by Velázquez’s portrait of Pope Innocent X that made him famous. It’s just that walking into Gagosian’s immaculate selection of his paintings feels like exploring the art treasures of St Peter’s and the Vatican, so sublime is this display. If these pictures...

Art Basel 2019 opens to the public on Thursday, June 13, with two preview days, on June 11 and 12. Some 290 galleries from 34 countries will show work at the Swiss fair, which runs through June 16.

Last year, Gagosian introduced an innovative virtual online viewing room during Art Basel. This year, the gallery is creating another sales platform during the Swiss fair, this time taking a bricks and mortar approach with an off-site pop-up exhibition titled Continuing Abstraction (10—16 June).

In March, the National Gallery of Australia will unveil its most recent significant international purchase, Francesco (2017), a sculptural portrait by Urs Fischer of respected Italian art curator Francesco Bonami standing atop a refrigerator, looking intently at an iPhone in his hand. The sculpture is designed to be burnt: wicks are inserted at...

Es ist bemerkenswert, wie viele warmherzige Umschreibungen Museumsdirektor Sam Keller für eine Kunst findet, die zunächst so kühl wirkt. Ihm gehe es mit Rudolf Stingel wie bei einer Wanderung in den Bergen, wenn man denkt, die Sonne sei jetzt aber wirklich untergegangen, man dann einen neuen Gipfel erreicht und sie wieder scheinen sieht. Der...

There is a five-minute video of rare archival footage of Helen Frankenthaler that captures her essence: a deeply intelligent, deliberate yet experimental painter, poised and forceful at the same time. ‘One cliché I use on myself all the time,’ she says, ‘is the one rule is no rules. And if you have a real sense of limits then you’re free to break...

In March 2019, the National Gallery of Australia (NGA) acquired Urs Fischer’s four-metre red wax sculpture, Francesco (2017), for their permanent collection. With wicks running through its wax frame, Francesco is designed to be lit and slowly melted like a candle. Documenting Francesco’s decomposition via social media, the NGA recently conducted an...

What does the United States look like, and who gets to decide? Our museums of modern and contemporary art, after far too long, have at last begun to esteem the work of living Native American artists—and several major shows, including the Whitney Museum of American Art’s just-opened biennial, have plunged into the ruinous legacy of settler...

The show, Desert Painters of Australia, at Gagosian’s Madison Avenue gallery on the Upper East Side opened this month. All the paintings were made in the past 30 years by Aboriginal painters from the central and western desert regions of Australia. One is borrowed from the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection of the University of Virginia, the...

Rumination and risk-taking, in equal measure, mark Jeff Wall’s spellbinding new exhibition at Gagosian Gallery in Chelsea.Since the 1970s, the restless 'conceptual photographer' has made single, large-scale prints using elaborate processes and layered references from other mediums like painting, film and theater. The final image was always...

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,...

Among the white walls of the galleryverse, the artist Urs Fischer’s works are colourful, colossal, ever playful, and always a little enigmatic. From a towering bust of Katy Perry filled with modelling clay to a painting of Liz Taylor covered with a kiwi, Fischer infuses each of his projects with his signature dose of acrid humour and child-like...

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...