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...

The internet's utopian promise in the 1990s may have been to make the world more interconnected, but its current state has exposed the fraying that accompanies every connection. The same might be said about production and consumption, which, far from creating an efficient feedback loop, have spewed their hazardous byproducts far into the air and...

At the pinnacle of Kara Walker's 13-metre-high fountain in Tate Modern's Turbine Hall, a Black woman's breasts and slashed jugular spurt water. It is horrifying. Maybe not so when you perceive the water as emerging only from her breasts, although the supposed excess layered onto Black femininity might jump out, but it chills to locate the source of...

Sculptors have always had it tough. Any unique instance of exploratory form in three-dimensions ultimately can't compete with the diverse world of objects and the inexorable gravity that pressurizes it all into our consciousness. Historical ways to outwit this "outside" pressure have ranged from twisting an animated mimesis from the human...

What does it mean to speak? To speak in a way that not only broaches the moral ambiguities of silence, but also probes the limits of speech's capacity to make sense of the world. William Kentridge, the Johannesburg artist and theatre director, addresses this question in a 2018 essay titled 'Let Us Try for Once'. The text forms part of a dispersed...

By the late 1980s, I had pretty much stopped looking at contemporary art. I no longer trusted my eyes to see what the art world had to offer, in part because I couldn't see the forest for the trees. Back then, the trees glistened with so much gold and so many pendants celebrating boy achievement, amen, that the product of their fame and riches –...

BILBAO, Spain — One of the strangest things about this exhibition is how invisible it is beyond Bilbao. How does it happen that a major artist like Jenny Holzer gets a major retrospective — the largest survey of her work to date — at a major museum like the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao but no catalogue is produced, and there is almost...

Laura Weir Clarke and Fred Clarke moved from their native Texas to Los Angeles in the mid-1960s, intoxicated by West Coast culture and in search of fine art. They wandered the city, knocking on studio doors of artists they respected seeking insight into the creative process, befriending artists Chris Burden and Larry Bell, gallery owner Margo...

L.A. master Ed Ruscha boasts Hollywood collectors including Leonardo DiCaprio, Owen Wilson and Jay-Z, but few can lay claim to as many of his works as architect Fred Clarke, partner of the late Cesar Pelli.

RHINEBECK, NY — Once there were formalists: critics and artists who looked for the meaning of art in the forms of art. On the American scene, the word summons up Clement Greenberg and the Greenbergians, critics who liked to talk about the integrity of the picture plane and 'purely optical space.' They were preceded by Roger Fry and Clive...

Shortly after my review of Amy Bennett's exhibition at Miles McEnery Gallery appeared on the Hyperallergic Weekend, I got an email from Mollye Miller, who, I later learned, is a photographer and poet living in Baltimore. In fact, she and I were published in the same little magazine, Prelude, edited by Stu Watson, but not in the same issue. But all...

Last month, a new sake bar opened at London's Institute of Contemporary Arts: a softly lit tunnel of booze that promises the kind of entrancing conversation one can never quite remember the next morning. A permanent installation designed by the artist Rirkrit Tiravanija, untitled 2019 (the form of the flower is unknown to the seed) is furnished...

I remember exactly where and when I decided to write a book about the moon: lying on my back in a dentist's chair, waiting for the anaesthetic to take effect. To distract his patients, the dentist had tacked a poster to the ceiling: a NASA image of the earth from space at night. I was struck by the way so much of the northern hemisphere glitters...

I'm preoccupied, at the moment, with the generosity of Robert Rauschenberg's art. This preoccupied his contemporaries, too, as John Giorno makes clear:'The most important thing I got from Bob Rauschenberg was just being with his mind [...] when you spend a lot of time with a great person's mind, somehow it has a profound effect on you. One sort of...

Mammoth scale paintings of glaciers drenched in nocturnal blues guard Lorna Simpson's Brooklyn Navy Yard studio on a rainy April day. This is the type of blue that permeates the sky at the darkest hour of the night, when above us is so pitch black that the sky resembles a dense blue. The same blue is echoed in Tarell Alvin McCraney's play I_n...

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,...

LOS ANGELES — At the Hammer Museum's career-spanning retrospective, Allen Ruppersberg: Intellectual Property 1968–2018, there is a painting that serves as a good introduction to the pioneering conceptual artist. Greetings from California (1972) depicts the silhouette of a mountain ridge at dusk (or is it dawn?), over which a rectangular, blue...

Jenny Holzer was 26 when she arrived in New York. The freshman art student at the Whitney Museum had grown up in Gallipolis, Ohio, a sleepy town in America's Midwest, and had spent her early twenties jumping from place to place in search of her artistic identity. She started out as an abstract expressionist. Then she tried to capture the human form...

As I looked through William Kentridge's That Which We Do Not Remember at Sydney's Art Gallery of New South Wales, led by the multimedia artist himself, it became increasingly apparent to me that Kentridge, often described as a distinctive and powerful voice in the global contemporary art realm, is both erudite and generous with his ideas.

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...

'My work', Bruce Nauman told Art in America in 1988, 'comes out of being frustrated about the human condition.' Black radical aesthetics and criticism prefigured my encounter with Disappearing Acts, the artist's retrospective survey at the Museum of Modern Art and MoMA PS1 in New York, which was first mounted at The Schaulager last summer in...

DENVER — Tara Donovan's artworks are unexpected: they borrow manufactured goods, but they are never readymades; they are theatrical and serial, but rarely considered minimalist; and they are massive in scale, but never outsourced. Fieldwork at the MCA Denver revisits Donovan's contributions from the last 20 years, bringing her wall-based and...

Immersing the spectator in site-specific installations that she herself compares to "studio visits," both intimate and in flux, US artist Sarah Sze combines intricate systems of objects and images across multiple mediums, from sculpture to painting, drawing, printmaking, and video. On the occasion of her first solo show in an Italian...

In 2018, artists and curators across the United States have been crafting brilliant exhibitions across the US, exploring themes of identity and community in innovative ways. Ebony G. Patterson made a maximalist tribute to victims of violence in her home country of Jamaica, while Joel Otterson crafted work recalling his parents' professions as a...