'I'm the Donald Trump of the art world,' Sean Scully jokingly declared in the BBC documentary released in April this year about his art and life as one of the world's wealthiest living artists, in which he jets around the world on his private jet.
KANSAS CITY, Mo.—There are walls—and then there are walls. Some, like the one that separated East and West Berlin, are designed to keep people in. Others, like the one snaking along portions of the southern border of the United States, are intended to keep people out. But the Walking Wall created by the artist Andy Goldsworthy at the...
Galerie Lelong, which manages Mendieta’s estate, is casting a light on a body of work that was believed to be lost and destroyed. Opening October 17 in New York, La Tierra Habla (The Earth Speaks) is the first exhibition and catalogue dedicated to a series of sculptures Mendieta produced in Cuba in 1981. Being uprooted from her Cuban homeland as...
Susan Laxton's book Surrealism at Play passionately traces how a particular art movement envisioned and articulated its own transformative potential. As Laxton illustrates, the Surrealists agitated for exploding art into life, which meant engaging with their day-to-day reality, and taking a critical stance toward it. A professor of art history at...
'Making art outside,' David Nash explains, 'is completely different from working inside.' He looks around the East Sussex drawing studio in which we are talking, and adds: 'In here we've got four walls, a flat floor and ceiling. We've neutralised the elemental forces. As soon as you go out there, you are dealing with slopes, wind, air, rain. You...
VENICE — The two most arresting exhibitions I saw among the Venice Biennale's collateral displays were Sean Scully's Human and Artists Need to Create on the Same Scale that Society Has the Capacity to Destroy: Mare Nostrum, curated by Phong Bui and Francesca Pietropaolo for The Brooklyn Rail. Scully's show is a magisterial display of a...
Leonardo Drew (b. 1961) considers himself an elder statesman of the art world. In his first exhibition, at age 13, he showed a larger than life painting of Captain America. His natural talent for draftsmanship earned him early opportunities to work at prestigious comic book publishers like Marvel and DC Comics, but Drew was after something more...
A Bigger Splash, a semi-fictionalized documentary about David Hockney opens with a ringing phone. A slideshow of photos flashes across the screen, and the shrill ringing goes on. Ten seconds... Twenty seconds... Forty... Over a minute goes by, and no one picks up. It dials up the anxiety on a film that, ostensibly, is about an artist and his...
The nomadic artist has spent years cultivating his craft. City to city, embracing identities and cultures and leaving remnants of himself behind; with every continent explored, iterations of those anthropological studies fortify his works further to cast bold socio political statements that resonate instantaneously.
A small sign outside Nancy Spero: Paper Mirror at MoMA PS1 says 'this exhibition may not be suitable for all audiences.' Fair enough, since the show contains some abstract, impressionistic depictions of Vietnam War atrocities and some garden-variety nudity. But when you think of the importance of her work in this moment, the sign also feels like...
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.
All that remained were 48 hats. 48 hats and 48 coats. 48 hats and 48 coats and 48 pairs of shoes. They lay, folded, in six lines of eight, the discarded wear of 48 absent men or the uniform of a single man, repeated some 48 times.
Leonardo Drew’s wooden assemblages inspire a distinctly energetic choreography. Employing the minute and the monumental as coconspirators in his visual schema, Drew facilitates an unanchored viewing experience wherein the breadth of each work is slowly revealed through explorations near, far, and even inside the object-environments he creates.
The 58 th 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...
It started with a passport. For artist Barthélemy Toguo, movement through the world was tethered to the small book he was required to carry when he traveled, within which his progress could be tracked at every border he tried to cross.
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...
A rickety-looking wooden boat is piled high with overstuffed bags covered in colorfully patterned African fabrics. Hanging overboard: a collection of plastic teapot-shaped pots and gasoline cans. Instead of floating on water, this ark is adrift on an ocean of green glass bottles. The boat is actually a piece of art called Road to Exile, by the...
Hockney–Van Gogh: The Joy of Nature is unabashedly a David Hockney (b. 1937) exhibition but with a twist, it winds the modern master's works around his lifelong fascination with Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890). It's a daring pairing, and as Edwin Becker, Head of Exhibitions at the Van Gogh Museum, told me, 'It's the first time we've dedicated our...
AMSTERDAM — Entering Hockney – Van Gogh: The Joy of Nature at Amsterdam's Van Gogh Museum is like walking into a painted fantasy forest. Tree trunks are rendered in red, blue, pink, purple, yellow, electric green; leaves are hinted at with quick brushstrokes, or cartoonishly outlined. In the galleries upstairs, we come out of the trees...
When I became an art critic in 1981 one of the first artists I met and wrote about was Sean Scully. At that time I was teaching philosophy in Pittsburgh and he, having recently moved to New York, was as yet without a dealer. We are almost the same age, and to some extent we grew up together. When we first met, he had just made the transition from...
'Matisse once said: two kilos of blue are bluer than one kilo of blue. Which is a very good remark, but in green it must be three kilos.' So says David Hockney in an interview with Hans den Hartog Jager, published for the first time in the exhibition catalogue for 'Hockney – Van Gogh: The Joy of Nature' at the Van Gogh Museum.
As we rewrite art history to recognize the contribution and impact of women from around the world, pointed attention has been dedicated to several bodies of work that reveal, beyond their formal singularity, radical modes of expression. One such artist is Etel Adnan, the 94-year-old Lebanese multimedia artist, writer, poet, and intellectual, whose...
It is a well-trodden argument to say that Ana Mendieta's work is about the body, yet her solo exhibition at the Institute of Modern Art in Brisbane, Connecting to the Earth, only once depicted the artist herself. For the most part, what one actually observed were the elements of landscape—mud, ice, fire and water—stamped with...
Who was here first—Nancy Spero, or Hernán Cortés? It may be too much to call Spero (or anyone) a 'universal' artist but her work certainly speaks to the weird postcolonial hybrids that survive as culture in the twenty-first century.
