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...

There can be no doubt that Richard Long is one of the giants of British art. Or so a very impressive curriculum vitae would lead one to suppose. He is now in his early 70s. He made his reputation almost half-a-century ago, as what was then called a Land Artist – going for epic walks, often through very remote locations.

Strange Days: Memories of the Future is overwhelming: complex, at times annoying and confusing, repetitive, uplifting and baffling. Like life, really. Films and videos by 21 artists are spread over three floors of the Store X on London's Strand.

Portraiture is an enduring art form, thanks to the narcissistic tendencies of the human race.

The one constant running through all of my writing on Whitney is his works on paper, which I am thinking about in the broadest sense—from the densely linear graphite concatenations he made in the late 1980s to the gouaches in fruity Popsicle colours from the past few years. It is clear to me that Whitney’s works on paper form a distinct body within...

It was a telling coincidence that the opening of the tenth Liverpool Biennial, curated by Kitty Scott (a curator at the Art Gallery of Ontario) and Sally Tallant (Director of the Liverpool Biennial), timed with Donald Trump's state visit to the UK.

Between Wimbledon and the FIFA World Cup, there's been plenty of distractions from London's unusually Mediterranean weather of late.