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 that...

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 book...

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 of a...

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 with...

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. Behind...

Characterised by a flatness of perspective and a uniformity of light, these pictures contain certain recurring motifs: a leg, large and incongruous like a divine icon; mysterious doors, always concealing whatever is behind them; and clocks that stand still at 10:45-the time at which, Noble says, Nobson was created, suggesting a surreal providence...

In 2012, with the design for the new US Embassy well underway, I approached Gagosian Gallery requesting a meeting with Rachel Whiteread about a potential commission there.Whiteread's inspired and compelling response was to create a transcendent work referencing affordable and transitional housing in both the United States and Britain. The theme...

Following a major stroke in 1996, Paik, ambitious as ever, began to infuse his TV sculptures with notes of personal and spiritual reflection. He made sculptural video homages to artist friends and gesturally painted and inscribed the old TVs and other found objects that crowded his studio, producing multilayered works that fulfill a promise he had...

For –one way or other– I've created a series of dispersed installations placed in conversation with particular elements of the building—floor, concrete wall, wooden clerestory. A group of twelve vitrines, the size of lancet windows, hang against the concrete wall of Pauline's studio. Each vitrine contains a strip of gilded porcelain, a single...

This is an island of refuge, a place of exile. In the 1930s the island becomes an agora: artists, writers, architects from Berlin, Vienna, Paris, walking the dusty hills. What is needed here? It is the question you can ask in this white landscape. Émigré Raoul Hausmann, Viennese artist and writer, photographs a well, a chair, a doorway, a woman...

An endless country traversed by telegraph poles, straight roads, and now and then a solitary car–or, actually more likely, a light pickup truck, slowly burrowing its way through the landscape toward the vanishing point. And if it were up to me, that truck would be an early-1950s Chevrolet Advance Design 3100. The 1950s were when the pickup truck...

LONDON — One of Europe's leading museums has devoted its biggest show of the season to someone who saw the future more clearly than any artist of his century. He was a restless traveler and a keen student of anatomy who danced across the boundaries of art and science. He blended ancient religion with new forms of representation, and sketched...

Artists and art spaces and museums and galleries, we're all part of a complex phenomenon. You walk into an exhibition, you never really know what it's about. You walk in and go 'What is this?' It is an open-ended discussion. And of course there are artists who are doing real social activism–Mark Bradford, Theaster Gates–a lot of artists are...

Situated just around the bend of a path, the sculpture is hidden. Coming across it is a surprise even when you know it's somewhere there. This sense of the unexpected is partly due to its size. It is not small; Nissen huts–the British design from which sprang American Quonset huts–are around sixteen feet wide by thirty-six feet long, and Rachel's...

Since Warhol's death in 1987 a lot of attention has been given to his pre-Pop work–his late-1940s student paintings, his '50s commercial art (book jackets, advertising drawings), and the personal work he made for friends and to charm art directors (handmade books, handbill calling cards). It's unusual for an artist's juvenilia to get so much...

Screens flicker and bodies groove across time in Nam June Paik's monumental installation Fin de Siècle II (1989). Framed within the displays of more than two hundred 1980s television sets, Merce Cunningham and his sinuous outline momentarily dance a duet. The two figures multiply across the kaleidoscopic screens–some remaining upright, some now...

'There's a painting for the show that's 100 percent cobalt blue, with a little corner of a more lavender blue. I conceived it when I was in bed for ten days with a terrible flu. It was the first of these big, double-square, mural-sized paintings in the series. I thought, 'I'm going to make a completely cobalt blue painting. Just straight cobalt...

Colen has been preoccupied with themes of performance, illusion, and self-portraiture in painting ever since his first exhibition, at Rivington Arms Gallery in 2003 (an exhibition that showcased his own obsessive streak, given that its four paintings took him four years to complete). In Me, Jesus and the Children (2001–2003), the artist's bare...

On a sprawling mesa in Topanga Canyon, flush with chaparral and oak, Nancy Rubins's elephantine, cascading sculpture Our Friend Fluid Metal (2014) rests atop a massive concrete pad. When first presented, at Gagosian on West 21st Street, the work undulated outward from the white wall, grasping and stretching into space while seeming to collapse...

This was to be Man Ray's final studio; he lived here for the rest of his life, right up until his death, in 1976. Rue Férou was the most improvised and personal studio of the artist's life. He made everything in it—tables, benches, chairs, lamps, and bookcases—and built a darkroom, a bedroom, and a kitchen. He also arranged a parachute...