'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.

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...

Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries (Young-hae Chang and Marc Voge)How did you first encounter the work of Nam June Paik?Paik accosted us in Paris, on the rue de Seine, in front of his hotel, La Louisiane, during the open market. Then he ran up to his room and brought us back a catalogue of his current show.

Piffaretti, along with French peers like Bernard Frize and Jérôme Boutterin, were not engaged in simple stylistic endeavors, but sought out new possibilities for abstraction, and went on to discover a provincial form of idiosyncratic painting; Piffaretti's twelve modest-sized paintings on view at Lisson present themselves as an altogether humbler,...

As always, there are many wonderful exhibitions, film festivals, and art events taking place throughout the fall in New York. We've put together our recommendations, and hope that they encourage you to explore the artistic happenings of this great city. Focusing on museums, art nonprofits, and galleries that continue to make New York a global hub...

India's first-ever contemporary sculpture park has launched its second edition. The not-for-profit project, inaugurated in December 2017, transformed the Madhavendra Palace in Nahargarh Fort, Jaipur, into an expansive sculpture gallery. The sculptures are displayed throughout the majestic rooms and grand courtyards of the 18th-century fortress,...

I WAS FINISHING UP A ONE-MONTH STAY AT JOAN MITCHELL'S HOUSE in France when I met Joyce. It was July 1981, and Joan had awed me with tales of affairs with Giacometti and Beckett while dissecting my childhood, my romantic life, and anything else I might confide.

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...

MAHÓN, Menorca — I usually don't go around ranking artists but I was enormously impressed by the Albert Oehlen retrospective in Venice this past January. I thought, who do we have as good as this guy? Seeing Stanley Whitney's most recent work this summer gave me my answer. While not departing from his known program, his newest seems to...

Five winners of the Turner prize are demanding an end to BP's sponsorship of the National Portrait Gallery, stepping up the campaign against big oil's involvement in the arts.Antony Gormley, Rachel Whiteread, Anish Kapoor, Gillian Wearing and Mark Wallinger are among a group of almost 80 leading artists, including winners of the BP portrait award,...

On some timely occasions, we get the true pleasure to be reminded of T.S. Eliot's 'historical sense' (from his famous 1919 essay Tradition and Individual Talent). This historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past but of its very presence, which simply implies a co-function of simultaneous existence and simultaneous...

VENICE, Italy — Acqua alta: high water. It's something Venetians have learned to live with, when the city floods under high tides and strong winds. It mainly happens in the winter, but even under the mild May sunshine, the crowds sipping coffee in Saint Mark's Square will sometimes get their feet wet. At these times, the lines between lagoon,...

Painter Joyce Pensato spent most of her life within blocks of the Brooklyn street where she grew up, working in semi-obscurity some decades before the neighbourhood turned remotely hip. Long admired by fellow painters such as Christopher Wool, Pensato only gained wide recognition in the mid-2000s for her dripping portraits of Felix the Cat, Batman...

For this exhibition, he has been thinking about water and how it has functioned as a vehicle for magical thinking throughout history, from the belief in sea monsters and other early legends to the pseudoscience of water memory used in homeopathic medicine today. Themes of deluge and the environment reveal themselves, and the work explores how...

The forest and the house are two psychologically-charged domains in the Western imaginary, both ruled by the play of light and shadow. When we can't see the far edge of the trees, a forest becomes an unfathomable mystery, and its secrets take on a more threatening character with the fall of night. The house, on the other hand, is the most intimate...

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,...

On the eve of Art Basel in Hong Kong's private view on Wednesday, the Beijing-based artist Huang Rui took to the streets of Central for a paint-splashed performance about the cyclical nature of history. The piece was a tribute to Lee Wen, the pioneering Asian performance artist who died early this month.

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...

In his 1914 neorealist manifesto, Charles Ginner rails against the 'academism' of 'weak or commercial painters,' who adopt the methods of creative artists and derive formulae from them, becoming 'Formula-Machines.' To circumvent such 'academism,' Ginner advocates for artists to anchor their works in their 'personal vision of nature and attitude...

The secluded London studio of Shirazeh Houshiary foxes my Uber driver entirely. But I shouldn't be surprised that the Iranian-born artist is off-grid. Among a heap of volumes that litter her studio floor is Reality is Not What it Seems by Carlo Rovelli, the quantum physicist whose luminous texts explain why Newtonian laws of space and time can only...

Last week, after reading the interview 'Have Aliens Found Us?' between the writer Isaac Chotiner and Avi Loeb, the chair of Harvard's astronomy department, in The New Yorker, I thought about Susan. She would have liked it, I imagined, because it discusses the fact that all the images of Oumuamua – an interstellar and possibly alien object detected...

In the opening image of John Akomfrah's Mimesis: African Soldier (2018), we are confronted by a row of black and brown faces who smile nervously and knowingly into the camera. They represent the faces we seldom see in war documentaries or history books; their smiles evoke a quiet sense of unease and foreboding. Once the colonial subjects of empire,...

For centuries, artists and philosophers have theorised about the relationship between private and public space, materially and conceptually. In Henri Lefebvre's Critique of Everyday Life (1947), he discusses the relationship between personal and private life as an 'interconnectedness', where our internal and external lives mutually inform one...