It was 50 years ago, but Penelope Seidler still recalls how she got involved in Wrapped Coast, the first Kaldor Public Art Project. 'I can remember John coming back from a trip and he said "Christo wants to wrap up a coast, that's what he wants to do. Do you know anywhere where he could do it?"' Seidler pauses, 'I was sort of bemused. I...

He’s a household name yet ‘most people do not know anything about Yves Klein’, says Daniel Moquay, director of the late French artist’s estate, and husband of Klein’s widow, Rotraut. Moquay has helped to coordinate an exhibition on Klein – who would have been 90 this year – taking place in the spectacular settings of Blenheim Palace.

The Art Newspaper: The Serpentine Mastaba is your first major sculpture in the UK. What is so special about this form?Christo: Mastaba is an old word coming from the first urban civilisation 7,000 years ago, when people moved from the countryside to mud houses in Mesopotamia, which today is Iraq. When for the first time archaeologists discovered...

Christo has been working with barrels since the start of his career, and many of his early works using them will appear in the Serpentine Gallery exhibition accompanying The Mastaba: 'retracing all that story,' as Christo puts it. In 1958, he was wrapping and stacking them and eventually he started filling rooms in galleries. The most famous of...

Galerie Gmurzynska is proudly presenting for the first time in Zurich in both gallery spaces an extensive selection of sculpture, drawings, photographs and archival material, with 27 works in total, celebrating and documenting Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s extraordinary career, stretching from their first seminal projects realized after relocating to...

In the late 1950s, five artists, all gay, living within a few blocks of one another in New York, redirected the course of American painting. They abandoned gestural expressionism and laid the groundwork for the pop and minimalist idioms of the following decade. Four of them have received plenty of credit for doing so: Ellsworth Kelly, Robert...

'I have a strong credo that an exhibition must embody real objects,' says curator Matthieu Poirier prefacing a walkthrough of The Brutal Play, in which works from Carl Andre, Donald Judd and Robert Morris occupy the Fondation CAB in Brussels. 'These objects remind the viewers of their own bodies.'

Since arriving in New York City in 1964, Christo and Jeanne-Claude have always compared their work to that of urban planners. The very fact that their larger-than-life projects are subject to approval by local authorities makes them resemble public construction projects more than works of art. This is what the new monograph Christo and...

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...

Today, Expo Chicago returns to its home on the Navy Pier overlooking Lake Michigan. This is the sixth edition of the city's annual art fair and exhibition platform, which is the biggest of its kind in the Midwest.The center of the fair lies in the convention center, where 135 galleries, non-profit organizations, and arts publications from 25...

When the artist David Smith died in an auto accident in 1965, he left behind nearly 100 of his large sculptures in the grass outside his studio in Bolton Landing, N.Y., in the Adirondacks. He coated most of those pieces in auto enamel, not only to protect their steel but to amplify, with bright colors and sometimes visible brush strokes, the works'...

In 1994, Donald Judd was preparing for The Moscow Installation, an exhibition with Kazimir Malevich that would be the first to align the work of the two titans of 20th-century art. 'I would love it but what would Malevich say?' Judd had said when Galerie Gmurzynska had proposed the idea. Sadly, Judd passed away before the exhibition opened and now...

Like the Baltimore Museum of Art's books, Louise B. Wheatley's textiles and Pendelton's mixed-media ventures pack a punch (actually, hers is more of a lingering touch). With her, you don't see it coming; with him, you can feel the vibrations down the block. Her mists/his missiles, resounding, both.

Doug Aitken is an artist known for stretching the terms 'site-specific' and 'land art' to their fullest. He's made his name as one of the US's most prolific artists by submerging sculptures into the Pacific Ocean, sending a train across the country to display original art by several interdisciplinary artists, and drilling a hole 700-feet into the...

Twenty years after the handover of sovereignty from the United Kingdom to China, Hong Kong stands at a crossroads. The generation to come of age in the intervening decades has become restless, frustrated by the rejection of demands for universal suffrage (the election for the next Chief Executive takes places tomorrow, March 26, but only 1194...

Now in its fifth edition, Art Basel Hong Kong has become a firm annual fixture on the city’s cultural – and art collector’s – map. With almost 80,000 visitors and surprisingly robust sales reported on opening night, this edition featured a stronger selection of works than previous years, and noticeably less bling on show by 242 galleries from 34...

The entrance hall to the Sainsbury Exhibitions Gallery at the British Museum is blood-red, and covered in Andy Warhol's psychedelic screenprints of Marilyn Monroe's face.It's a punchy start to the exhibition, The American Dream: Pop to the Present.

More than two hundred artists, musicians, writers, and arts professionals from forty countries have pledged to take part in Hands Off Our Revolution, a global art project that will organize a series of exhibitions and other programming to confront the rise of right-wing populism around the world.

Two or three muted, but skillfully executed, pieces of portraiture slowly lead the viewer to paintings with the merest hint of figures, before dissolving entirely into realms of line, colour, light and rhythm. This is just the first room of the major Abstract Expressionism show at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, fresh from a groundbreaking run at...

During his lifetime, Donald Judd (1928–1994) compiled four major collections of his writings. These volumes, which include his gallery reviews, book reviews, essays, articles, statements and reports have until now been considered the artist's written work in its entirety. But a new collection, Donald Judd Writings, containing previously unpublished...

Redwood City, CaliforniaA benevolent pirate ship is about to settle in Redwood City, thanks to the curator Lance Fung. Instead of looters, the artists Ilya and Emilia Kabakov’s large-scale boat installation (with the word 'IMAGINE' nearby) will bring a new emphasis on public art to the area. Fung — who is best known for curating a show of...

It’s dark backstage as artists Ed Moses, Ed Ruscha, Larry Bell and Billy Al Bengston get miked up to appear before a packed house at the Broad Stage in Santa Monica. The glow of house lights seeps in from the stage wings and the audible bustle of audience members settling into their seats fills the tiny backstage nook. Pre-show suspense hangs in...

Over the course of his presidency, Barack Obama gifted Ed Ruscha’s Column with Speed Lines print multiple times to world leaders. The classical aesthetic of the architectural detail with the linear suggestions of movement seems to balance two aspects of American culture, the weight of the republic and the speed of the open road.The work is one of...

The sculptor Donald Judd, one of the most important artists of the mid20th century, declared that he took up writing in the early 1960s purely as a 'mercenary,' to earn money as a critic in his spare time. The statement was about as sincere as the oft-cited one of the novelist John Cheever — that literature is not a competitive sport. Both men...